DS News

22 The Exchange Arthur Johnson serves as VP of Fannie Mae's Capital Markets, leading the Mortgage Backed Security (MBS) Policy team responsible for maintaining the integrity of its securitization programs. e team provides policy guidance and decisions related to business priorities impacting MBS and related disclosures. Prior to this role, Johnson held several positions in various organizations within Fannie Mae, including Single-Family Operations, the Treasurer's Office, and Project Management that supported several corporate initiatives to enhance Fannie Mae's securitization programs. Johnson holds an MBA in International Finance from American University and a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from the University of California, San Diego. Earlier this year, Fannie Mae announced that it issued $111 million in Single-Family Green Mortgage-Backed Securities (MBS) since April 2020, when it first introduced these transactions to the market. e program is part of Fannie Mae's larger effort to tie its business activities to measurable and positive Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) outcomes. DS News had a chance to speak with Johnson and discuss the importance of this new initiative to the market and how it has been received by the industry to date. Describe Fannie Mae's Single-Family Green Mortgage-Backed Securities program and what it means for the market. As of January, Fannie Mae had issued more than $100 million in green bonds within 10 months of the program's inception. at is a great milestone for us. Back in 2019, we were considering how we were going to construct this program, and there were multiple directions we could go. We ended up deciding to start off small and slow, in order to ensure that we could build out the infrastructure to support the program that we wanted. We felt that if we were sporadic in our issuances of these bonds, the market may not take it seriously. We focused first on newly constructed residential properties with specific certification standards. We partnered with a third party to evaluate all the outstanding certifications, and with their help, we collaboratively decided that Energy Star Version 3.0 was a great guideline to start our program. Energy Star products are nationally and globally known. Energy Star homes are, on average, 20% more efficient than those built to code. at alone was a good story that we thought investors would like. Did you have a timeline in mind to hit the $100 million mark? How did you envision this playing out? We didn't have any specific goals because we wanted to see how it was going to work out. We had talked to several market participants prior to initiating this program just to get their insight. is type of program was so new to them that they didn't really have a perspective on what type of investment they would want to participate in. Market participants, from an investor standpoint, got on board quickly, and it enabled us to more quickly get to this $100 million milestone than we thought we were going to. In the beginning, investors were particularly hesitant … it was new to them. But as we continued the programmatic issuances of the securities, I think it started to pique more and more interest, and we received interest from a broad investor spectrum—money managers, bank portfolios, and insurance companies. We finally went out with a public auction Arthur Johnson VP of Capital Markets, Fannie Mae Get to Know Industry Executives Beyond the Boardroom "Energy Star homes are, on average, 20% more efficient than those built to code. That alone was a good story that we thought investors would like."

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