Gowling WLG

Partner

Naina is a vastly experience structured finance lawyer with a proven track record in navigating complex financial landscapes. With a career spanning more than 20 years, Naina has advised the most prestigious global financial institutions on structured finance transactions. Her clients benefit from a strategic approach that balances legal precision with a deep understanding of the evolving financial markets. Whether it's asset-backed securities, derivatives or securitisation, Naina provides insightful counsel to guide clients through intricate financial structures.

Naina has been actively involved in the creation of innovative structured transactions; structuring, drafting and negotiating complex financings including complex repo facilities, hybrid structured products with multiple embedded derivatives, repackaging, synthetic CLOs and regulatory driven structured transactions; all types of securitisation transactions and restructuring them; supervision of large scale remediation project involving the mis-selling of interest rate swaps, financial regulatory projects and investor litigation.

Naina also has deep experience in acting for originators/sponsors in structuring and launching their first residential mortgage backed securitisation where she guides her clients through the legal, structural, operational and regulatory challenges involved in structuring their debut transaction. She has particular expertise in advising on managing legal risk globally across various businesses for investment banks, retail banks, corporate clients and fin-techs. She has advised on a wide range of issues including swaps, disclosure matters under the Prospectus Directive, US 144A SEC registered deals, master trusts, CMBS and RMBS securitisations, sale and leaseback structures for loan securitisations and large scale loan portfolio sales (both for performing loans and non-performing loan portfolios) in competitive bid scenarios. She has worked on the trading desks of two global investment banks where she worked on loan origination, leveraged finance, acquisition finance and advised on highly structured real estate finance transactions, risk mitigation techniques and structured syndication.

In the derivatives space, Naina has advised on fund-linked notes, a range of exotic trades, CDOs, CLOs and various restructurings conducted during and post-credit crunch. She has structured and documented trades that achieved regulatory capital and balance sheet treatment using a combination of techniques such as credit default swaps (CDS), call options and total return swaps (TRS) along with securitisations. She has in-depth expertise on FX products having managed a large scale global project on documenting FX ISDA confirmations automatically using AI technology.

Naina works closely with the Pensions team and has advised pension trustee clients on entering into a range of GMRAs and ISDAs and with the Real Estate Finance team advising various borrowers on their hedging strategy.

As a subject matter expert in her field, Naina is also a corporate trainer whereby she designs and leads engaging training seminars delivered to senior legal personnel in the industry, C-suite executives, bankers and compliance personnel.