Winston & Strawn Sponsors, Speaks at ABS East 2025

Winston & Strawn was proud to sponsor ABS East 2025 at the Fontainebleau in Miami Beach. ABS East is one of the world’s preeminent events in the structured finance space, hosting over 7,000 industry professionals for three days of insightful and high-impact programming.

Michelle Abad, partner and co-chair of our Residential Asset Finance and Securitization practice, moderated the conference’s “RMBS Market Outlook” panel.

Key takeaways include:

1. RMBS issuance has doubled in size over the past few years despite a tough origination market, with CES mortgage supply output staying consistently and particularly high.
2. Now that rates are starting to fall, we should continue seeing increased issuance without the need to expand lending criteria, but the market may be at an inflection point regarding high WAC mortgages, and so the industry needs to start thinking about refinancings and prepayments.
3. With the amount of cash, liquidity, and technology currently available in the RMBS market, we can expect originators and investors to continue engaging not only with agency product but also with rising levels of private-label assets.

Structured Finance partner Chris Capitanelli spoke on the conference’s “Non-Bank & Online Lending” panel.

Key takeaways include:

1. There have been a good number of term deals for securitization of BNPL assets in 2025 so far, along with a host of smaller forward flow and structured certificate transactions.
2. Because BNPL assets handle massive volumes of micropayments across various industries and multiple definitions of payment events, investors need to have a solid understanding of how these payments are coming in, from whom, and at what velocity, or they won’t get the returns they expect.
3. BNPL will continue to operate in a highly complicated regulatory environment. This is especially true at the state level, where a growing number of states are not only passing new truth-in-lending laws but are also specifically targeting BNPL under both new and existing financial regulatory regimes.

Structured Finance partner Sean Kelly moderated the conference’s HEI Investor Breakfast, an informal education and networking event that combined a short panel discussion with interactive breakout conversations held over breakfast.

Winston lawyers Pete Morgan, Michael Mullins, Francisco Flores, Nolan Bolduc, Russell Casper, Aaron Benjamin, Dan Passage, and Reuben Levavi also attended the conference, and our whole team attended our cocktail reception on the rooftop of the Soho Beach House.