Senior Departures Hit NatWest’s Nascent SRT Team

Reporting: Nadezhda Bratanova

NatWest Markets is set to lose two senior members of its private credit syndicate team, according to sources. The duo are departing the desk that is in the process of building out the bank’s significant risk transfer, or SRT, program.

Director Owen Muller and Vice President Francesca Foley are due to depart from the bank and are currently on notice, according to sources.

The move comes at a time when NatWest is understood to be sounding out investors for a new commercial real estate transaction tied to £3.5 billion of loans.

Muller has spent more than a decade at NatWest, first joining the bank as a graduate analyst in 2015, before progressing through analyst, associate and vice president roles to become a director in 2023. During his tenure, he has worked across a range of structured finance products, including public and private asset-backed securities, autos, residential mortgages and mezzanine warehouse transactions. He has further experience in working on esoteric asset classes such as synthetic regulatory capital transactions and nonperforming portfolio sales.

Foley joined NatWest in 2023 from AIG, where she spent roughly four years serving as an investment analyst and covering structured credit.

Both Muller and Foley have been actively involved in the syndication, distribution and execution of NatWest’s SRT deals, working closely with the bank’s balance-sheet management arm to increase its presence in the market.

In 2024, NatWest formally reentered the SRT space after approximately four years of absence, making synthetic securitizations a key component of its capital optimization strategy. At the time, the bank hired SRT specialist Rob Lloyd from Lloyds Bank as head of balance-sheet management within the group’s commercial and institutional division. Lloyd was brought in to oversee the renewed Nightingale program and help to scale SRT origination across asset classes, working with Muller and Foley.

By the end of 2025, NatWest had executed a total of seven synthetic securitization transactions under the program, according to its latest Pillar 3 disclosures, with market sources saying issuance pace is set to increase this year.

The bank has since built relationships with a number of specialist SRT investors, with some of the publicly disclosed counterparties including Nuveen and Christofferson Robb & Company.

“We can confirm that Owen will be leaving the business and that we have appointed a new Securitised Products & Alternatives Syndicate who will join on 1 September,” a spokesperson for NatWest said.