Laurel Davis has been instrumental in moving U.S. housing finance forward through her contributions to the development of the newly created credit risk transfer market. She is responsible for bringing the first Connecticut Avenue Securities (CAS) transaction to market, an entirely new market sector which has quickly become one of the largest and most liquid segments of the securitized products market.
Davis applies her deep understanding of the credit markets, CRT programs, and Fannie Mae’s credit risk management approach to effectively communicate with the investment community to drive liquidity and broaden program acceptance. Under her direction, the CRT market continues to expand risk-sharing on over $760 billion in U.S. residential mortgage loans since program inception.
In 2016, Davis and her team received recognition by Risk Magazine with the first-ever Sovereigns, Supranationals, and Agencies (SSA) Deal of the Year Award for the “cleverly evolving” risk transfer CAS program.
Davis leads cross-functional teams that set out to, and succeeded in, building a market for single-family mortgage credit and effectively showcase the tools that underpin Fannie Mae’s manufacturing process. Based on investor feedback, her CRT team created Data Dynamics, a tool that allows users to interact with and analyze the historical loan performance data, deal issuance data, and ongoing disclosure data that Fannie Mae makes available to support its credit risk-sharing programs.
Prior to joining Fannie Mae, Davis served in a variety of securitization, trading and capital markets roles at Merrill Lynch and First Republic Bank.