Sycamore Advisors hires Peter Orr, Ching Yin

Indianapolis-based Sycamore Advisors is building its quantitative muscle with two new municipal finance hires.

Peter Orr joins the municipal advisory firm as senior managing director and Ching Yin as senior vice president. Areas of focus will include analytical tools and quantitative modeling. Both are based in New York.

"The regulatory environment I think has continued to push MA firms in this direction," Sycamore President Diana Hamilton told The Bond Buyer. "We're extensively involved in document preparation, along with counsel. We've created several new credits for clients. We are very involved in the ratings presentation and are very focused on the ability to extract any kind of credit upgrade or put the client on a trajectory that better positions them.

"That's a critical part of our objective with our clients: to get them on the right trajectory with the credit rating agencies," she said.

The firm says Orr and Yin bring extensive experience in structuring large tender transactions and state revolving fund pooled programs, clean energy and charter schools, respectively.

Orr has served as municipal advisor on nearly two dozen deals for the city of Chicago, the Chicago Transit Authority, the Chicago Board of Education, Cook County, and O'Hare and Midway airports since he founded the firm Public Alternative Advisors in 2015.

Hamilton said Orr played a pivotal role in restructuring bonds with swaps attached after Moody's downgraded the city in 2015, saving the city around $10 million.

He was MA on the deal that won The Bond Buyer's 2023 Deal of the Year award, an ambitious financing benefiting affordable housing, homelessness and environmental justice programming that drew on both Chicago's general obligation credit and the Sales Tax Securitization Corporation credit, yielding 10 series of bonds, including the city's first social-designated bonds.

"Peter Orr is an institution in the public finance industry," said Lois Scott, president of Epoch Advisors and former CFO of Chicago. "His exceptional analytic skills, easy-going manner and attention to detail made him a pleasure to work with. I hired him to work on the toughest finance challenges Chicago faced, across almost all city credits."

Orr earned his Master of Science in applied mathematics from the University of Chicago. He previously was an investment banker at JP Morgan and Bear Stearns, in addition to working as a derivatives specialist, technologist, quantitative modeler and MA.

Yin worked with the New York City Municipal Water Finance Authority for nearly ten years, and structured both their Environmental Facilities Corporation bonds and stand-alone issuances. She has held various senior level roles at Lamont Financial Services.

A chartered financial analyst and a Series 50-qualified municipal advisor, she earned her MBA from Baruch College.

"Ching ran all the numbers for New York Water for a decade, and people would tell you they absolutely relied on her level of accuracy," Hamilton said. "In both cases, the reputation and the integrity of their work were the two most significant considerations."

The hires represent an investment in sophistication for Sycamore.

"I wanted to have a firm that would provide me with the type of financial advice, as an advisor, that I wanted when I was an issuer," said Hamilton, who cut her teeth at Salomon Brothers and later served as public finance director for Indiana Gov. Frank O'Bannon before founding Sycamore Advisors.

"That's one of the reasons why Peter and Ching are so essential: because they've been doing this for 25, 30 years," she added. "Clients always have to see that they're better off for having done X versus Y" ? which Sycamore is able to demonstrate using the software Orr developed.

"It's just sometimes the ability to look at a problem a little differently and use an alternate software approach, which allows you to reach a better conclusion for the client," Hamilton said.