Jaeha LeeNew York

GreensLedge, part 1 of 1

A narrow corner of finance

Structured credit was technical and specialized, and it made me more interested in finance, not less.

Summer 2024Investment banking summer analyst

Context

In summer 2024, after my first year at NYU, I was an investment banking summer analyst at GreensLedge, a firm that advises on structured credit.1 It was my first formal internship, and it came directly out of my freshman-year cold emails.

The problem

Structured finance is a very specialized corner of the industry. The products are technical, the vocabulary is dense, and a lot of the job is making complicated structures understandable to investors who have to decide quickly whether they want in.

I arrived knowing almost none of it. I had to learn the products fast enough to be useful on live work.

What I did

  • Redrew the capital structures. For six structured products, I redesigned the visuals that showed investors how each deal was layered and who got paid in what order. Clearer visuals meant the team could turn investor pitch materials around about 30% faster.
  • Built a tracking dashboard. I built a dashboard that followed more than 500 fixed-income assets, so the team could see the whole book in one place instead of assembling it each time.
  • Pulled the data into one place. Inputs were coming from more than five external rating sources. I brought them into one internal tracking system, which cut manual data pulls by about a fifth.

What I learned

The work was narrow and technical, and I expected that to make finance feel smaller. It did the opposite. Seeing how much thinking goes into deciding who gets paid first, and why, made me more curious about how capital actually works.

That fall I joined Stern’s Special Situations Investing Group. I was one of a small group selected from more than 300 applicants for a year-long program on distressed investing and restructuring, with weekly technical sessions on accounting, capital structure and valuation. It was the natural next step from a summer spent on capital structures.

Footnotes

  1. Structured credit means pooling loans or other debts and selling securities backed by them, in layers that carry different levels of risk. ↩