Structured finance transactions, whether of the CLO or CDO
variety, are highly regulated today, following the losses certain
types of these products suffered in and around the 2008 financial
crisis. Nevertheless, with the strong performance of the leveraged
finance market, the market for CLOs has rebounded strongly in the
intervening years. At the same time, certain other structures are
still less common and might have been overlooked by investors in
recent years. One of these is the collateralized fund obligation
(CFO).
How are CFOs different?
In other structured finance or securitization transactions, the
transaction sponsor creates a pool of income-producing assets that
are designed to produce cash flow on a regular, predictable
schedule. One key variable could be the speed of prepayments, in
cases where the underlying assets are susceptible to prepayment,
but otherwise the portfolio generates interest and principal
payments on a fixed timetable, subject to