How do you combine a career in structured finance with trips to the Cannes film festival and seats at the best soccer matches in Europe? Dorian Klein, managing director of European structured finance at Merrill Lynch in London, makes it part of the job. For the past year and a half his team has worked with intellectual property rights, pulling off a major film rights securitization last year.
Remember David Pullman's $55 million Bowie bonds (a securitization of the singer's future royalty income) launched at the beginning of 1997? He had been touted as putting this sector on the map. "A lot have tried but few firms enter as competitors," boasts Pullman, managing director of Pullman Group. "It takes time to develop this sort of asset class." Pullman concedes that Klein's film securitization was one of the rare few successful deals that was not executed by his firm.
Merrill's team is a much bigger operation than the boutiques (like Pullman's) doing these sorts of deals, so many securitizations are simply too small and risky to be worthwhile. "Movies and sports are the two things that have the combination of big size, interest, marketability and liquidity that would be appropriate for us," says Klein, whose team aims for deals larger than $100 million.