Category: Our History

By 2008, servicing was finally sexy. While no one created any calendars of bare-chested servicing executives, services were now the first responders on the front lines of an unprecedented economic firestorm. In our event advertising, we re-purposed the EUROPESERVICING 2005 ad, “Do I Really Need to Care About Mortgage Servicing?” by scratching out the title…

EUROCATALYST returned in 2007 to Madrid, where it all started five years earlier. The theme that year was “Quemando La Casa” (Burning Down the House). On July 29, 2007, President George W. Bush stated, “the fundamentals of our economy are strong…I’m told there is enough liquidity in the system to enable markets to correct”. In…

In 2006, EUROCATALYST was not held due to my immediate concern that mortgage markets were about to blow up. I thought that all of our efforts and industry wide attention should be focused on servicing in anticipation of the collapse. This year, we placed ads in European industry publications with tongue-in-cheek advertising that said, “Who…

In 2005, EUROCATALYST was held in Rome with the support of the Italian Banking Association. The opening session, “Retail Markets at Wholesale Prices: Gauging the Impact of Globalization on Mortgage Markets” directly questioned the rationality of commoditizing high-risk mortgage assets on a global scale. In the mortgage funding session, “Securitization and Lending Anarchy”, the discussion…

By 2005, so little attention was paid to servicing that we created a new event, EUROPESERVICING, to motivate underappreciated services and drive improvements in the sector throughout Europe. It is the first time that an event dedicated to servicing in Europe was ever held. One of the main advertisements for the event stated, “Sure, Europe…

EUROCATALYST 2004 was held in Berlin to draw attention to the weakened status of German banks and its implications across the EU banking sector. As the world’s third-largest economy (in terms of GDP) in 2004, the German economy continued to bear the weight of economic integration between East and West Germany. Exacerbating the burden, its…

By 2004, mortgage-backed securities and covered bonds were in fierce competition to attract an alpha-hungry global investor base. At the same time, national market covered bond issuers were in fierce competition with each other. In 2004, we undertook a one-year market positioning mandate for all covered bond issuers in the Nordic countries (Denmark, Sweden, Norway…

In 2003 we once again undertook a series of national market “road shows” throughout the year to promote the event and discuss its upcoming program topics. EUROCATALYST 2003 was held in Lisbon, Portugal, to highlight the fact that Portugal had the highest volume of mortgage-backed securities issuance in Europe that year. The event theme was…

I decided to hold the first event in Madrid because I thought that if mortgage markets were to implode, Spain would get hit the worst. At that time, Spain had experienced the most dramatic rise in house prices due to a phenomenon that no one wanted to discuss publicly: In the buildup to the launch…

In 2001, I began to turn my accidental “research clearinghouse” into a more formal network that brought together all of the most important market players from each EU country to meet and collaborate with their counterparts. Hence the name, “EuroCatalyst”. At that time, there were 12 distinct national EU markets, each one having their own…