Mayer Brown's Financial Services Focus podcast offers insight from our lawyers on the pivotal trends currently shaping the financial services industry. Topics include regulation leading up to the US election, impactful state laws, vendor risk, cybersecurity, structured finance, private credit investments, M&A activity, digital assets, fee lawsuits, AI discrimination claims, and commercial mortgage issues.
Financial Services Focus also provides a UK/European perspective, analyzing parallels and differences from US trends in areas like fintech, AI oversight and outsourcing rules. Our goal is to keep clients updated on the latest legal and market developments impacting financial services, wherever in the world you are.
The CLO Chronicles — NAIC's New Life RBC Factors Cross the Finish Line
For the past four years, the NAIC has been rethinking how much capital life insurance companies should hold against their investments in collateralized loan obligations (CLOs) — essentially, packages of corporate loans that insurers have increasingly turned to for higher returns. In a new episode of Financial Services Focus, partners Lauren Pryor and Larry Hamilton walk through the biggest changes to hit insurance company investment portfolios in years, and explain why the ripple effects will reach well beyond CLOs.
As you move down the credit spectrum, charges rise sharply, in some cases more than doubling. For the first time, the rules account for "tranche thickness": thinner, lower-rated tranches now carry dramatically higher capital charges because they're more vulnerable to sudden losses. These new factors take effect for year-end 2026 calculations, meaning insurers need to be modeling the impact now. Perhaps the most consequential development discussed in this episode isn't a rate table at all. Listen to the newest episode now.
29 Jun 2026
Navigating Distress: Commercial Real Estate Workouts in the CMBS and CLO Markets
In this episode of Mayer Brown's Financial Services Focus, real estate partner Michael Weiss and Michael Cohen of Brighton Capital Advisors discuss the current state of the U.S. distressed commercial real estate market, with particular emphasis on CMBS and CLO loan workouts. The conversation explores why multifamily, office, and hotel assets face mounting pressure from high interest rates, overleveraging, and an approaching wave of loan maturities—and why conditions may be worse than widely reported. Cohen draws on over 30 years of Commercial Real Estate securitized lending experience to outline practical strategies for borrowers, stressing the importance of early engagement, assembling the right advisory team, and understanding loan document nuances before distress escalates. The episode concludes with actionable guidance for sponsors seeking to protect their interests and position themselves for successful outcomes in an increasingly challenging refinancing environment.
6 May 2026
Consolidation, AI, and the Future of Mortgage Servicing
In this episode of Financial Services Focus, Mayer Brown partner Lauren Pryor is joined by John Guzzo, Managing Director at Houlihan Lokey; Dan Thompson, CEO of Preferred Mortgage Services; Romalene Tolentino, Founding Partner of Preferred Mortgage Services; and Rajesh Bhat, Board Member of Preferred Mortgage Services and former founder and CEO of Roostify, for a wide-ranging conversation on the forces reshaping the mortgage servicing market. The panel examines how post-crisis regulatory shifts and rising technology demands have driven significant consolidation among servicers and their vendors, why outsourcing is increasingly oriented toward access to specialized expertise rather than simple cost reduction, and how cloud-based platforms are beginning to modernize historically manual processes such as investor reporting and exception management. The discussion also addresses the promise and risks of generative and agentic AI in a highly regulated environment—from automating exception resolution and document processing to the critical importance of human-in-the-loop guardrails, robust audit trails, and evolving liability frameworks.
Podcast Authority Score: 39 / 100
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