
Sabrina Fox, CEO of ELFA:
“It’s been an exciting start to a transformative year for ELFA.”
The year ahead is set to be a defining one for ELFA.
During the first half of the year, we will conduct a search to bring a Director of Legal & Regulatory onto the team to support our members and the wider asset management community through targeted engagement with regulators and policy-makers.
In March we will host our flagship Career Day event, designed to widen the funnel for individuals from diverse backgrounds coming into the leveraged finance market. This event was responsible for hiring some of the excellent Research Analysts you will meet in this newsletter – one of whom, Michael Damoah, is currently on the job hunt – we at ELFA will miss him, but this is great news for the firm lucky enough to hire him.
We will publish an update to our ESG Fact Sheet Series, now covering 15 sectors and featuring an Excel table for ESG KPIs and SFDR PAIs. The update clarifies carbon data requests and questions on executive pay structures, anti-bribery, anti-corruption and whistle blower policies and procedures, among other important topics.
We begin our Platinum Partnerships with Covenant Review and Sustainable Fitch, each important players in their respective markets of covenant analysis and ESG scoring. Our work to increase transparency in these areas will only be enhanced by these relationships.
We also plan to deepen engagement between our members and partners even further, providing participating firms in our Partner Programme with periodic meetings with our committee Co-Chairs and distributing summaries of our key initiatives on a quarterly basis. Our partners are integral to our work, helping to guide our efforts to increase the strength and resilience of the leveraged finance market.
We are also seeking to grow our membership beyond the current 62 member firms and I plan to continue the ELFA roadshow to several jurisdictions throughout Europe to ensure that we represent the views and issues of lenders across the continent.
It’s been an exciting start to a transformative year for ELFA. Shortly we will publish our Annual Review for the 2021/2022 membership year – in it we share our growth, achievements and plans for 2022/2023. Engagement is a central focus on of our organisation, so if something piques your interest, we’d love to hear from you!