David C. Stevens is currently collaborating with the Results for Development Institute on two projects: The first is Affinity MacroFinance (AMF), a mutual financial guarantee insurance company for the developing world; AMF recently won first prize honors in the Gates-World Bank Agence Francaise de Developpement sponsored Marketplace in Innovative Finance. R4D hopes to launch AMF by the fourth quarter of 2010. The second is a project focused on small and medium size enterprise (SME) development in the emerging markets; in this case, he has designed a financing program that would catalyze otherwise nearly dormant pension fund balances for developmental purposes, such as SMEs, utilities, health care, education and infrastructure.
From 2004-09, he served as CEO of Capital Markets Development Corporation (CMDC), a development-stage financial guaranty insurance company focused on credit enhancement in the nascent fixed-income capital markets of emerging markets countries globally. CMDC had been expected to launch in 2007, but that launch was a casualty of the current credit crunch. CMDC’s investor group included a number of leading global insurance and reinsurance companies, private equity firms specializing in the emerging markets and social investors. CMDC had received A ratings from Fitch and S&P, which would have allowed it to play the role of a AAA guarantor in the local currency capital markets of its target emerging market countries, all of which are rated between BB and A on the global rating scale.
Mr. Stevens previously served as CEO of XL Capital Assurance, a New York-based AAA-rated financial guaranty insurance company. During his 1999-2004 tenure at XLCA, the Company grew to become the fourth largest AAA-rated US bond insurer, with a staff of 135 professionals and approximately $65Bn in insured obligations. XLCA focused more heavily than its competitors on emerging market transactions, closing deals in Chile, Brazil, Mexico, Turkey, Jamaica, Korea, El Salvador, Costa Rica, and Turkey, among other countries. XLCA went public as Security Capital Assurance (now Syncora Corporation) in 2006 and shortly thereafter went into decline and eventual run-off as a result of exposure to sub-prime collateral in MBS and CDO securities, transactions that were underwritten in 2005-2007. Mr. Stevens resigned in 2004, when XLCA was still a healthy AAA firm, in order to pursue his interest in the emerging markets.
From 1990-1999, Mr. Stevens worked at MBIA Insurance Corporation, the largest firm in the financial guarantee industry. During that period, Mr. Stevens was charged with working out problem credits within the public and structured finance portfolios of MBIA; developing the company’s Latin American business, which included closing the industry’s first emerging markets local currency-denominated infrastructure development transactions; and serving on the firm’s senior management policy and executive credit committees.
Previously Mr. Stevens worked as a commercial lender at Bank of America and First Interstate Bank; as a North Carolina state government telecommunications policy analyst; and as an English and Journalism teacher. He holds a BA from Stanford University, an MAT in English Education from Duke University, and an MBA from the Columbia University Graduate School of Business. He is married with one adult daughter and two grandchildren. He was born and raised in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and is fluent in Spanish.