Dear Program Director:
I am a Managing Director in Citibank's Global Structured Solutions Group, a part of Capital Markets Origination. I am a tax attorney by training, and my current role is to lead and develop a tax residual liability trading business.
I was initially introduced to Nitin when he was a project leader in the technology group. At the time, my group and I were working on developing a pricing model for complex tax securities. Nitin single handedly managed and wrote the code for the pricing of those tax securities. He had no prior knowledge or work in this space, but was able to develop our working model. His only request of me at the time was to borrow some books about tax and fixed income bonds. He consulted with various internal or external control functions regarding any questions he had and delivered an excellent product that is currently in use to price and bid on tax securities.
Nitin and I have been running the NER trading desk together for last 7 years. He is responsible for pricing NERs, which is the most complicated tax security in the REMIC Securitization structure. Prior to this, he worked to develop and build the program that prices the NERs and thus understands the unique nature of the code design. Most importantly, he bridges the gap between understanding the security pricing market and systems development. This is a critical role for our market. He is also responsible for monitoring the NER market and the development of modeling solutions to the evolving marketplace. Much of the trading aspects of NERs require an understanding of REMIC Rules and implementing the Rules into modeling code. On his own initiative, Nitin sought to learn the rules by reading and consulting with appropriate groups to a level of mastery, as shown by his production of excellent systems for model development.
I have worked with Nitin on several transactions. One of the key trades was the purchase of the entire portfolio of non-economic residual securities (NERs) from the Lehman bankruptcy estate. We negotiated this very complex transaction not only with the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy estate, but also various other parties involved in the bankruptcy procedure such as: creditors committee, external law firms, and tax advisors to Lehman. This transaction included difficult negotiations with various unaligned parties representing different creditors from the Lehman bankruptcy, and analyzing and pricing a portfolio of __ NER deals. We had to coordinate with various trustees and control function to get the required data for the analysis. Nitin played a key role in both pricing and negotiating the price in this transaction. He lead the valuation process, bucketed the portfolio based on deal characteristics, and analyzed the deals based on the relevant risk factors. He was extensively involved in the negotiation process with the client. His understanding of the risk profile of the deal, understanding of the mortgage market, and the benefit to the institution, helped us get to a price that resulted in significant profit to Citibank.
Over the years, Nitin has grown into a managerial role. He started as a quantitative analyst and is now managing a book of NER securities. Together we are responsible for generating revenue in the range of $__ to $__ million. He is also responsible for generating ideas for new products that have lead to direct new revenue for the group. As part of the business he is responsible for coordinating with various control function inside Citibank.
In sum, I highly recommend Nitin for admission to your program. He has proven himself to be self-motivated, eager to learn, driven, hardworking, a good business partner, and with a good sense of business acumen. He will be a great asset and contribute enormously to any program that recruits him.
Thank You,
