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16 In his new role, Grow oversees the day-to-day operations of Morningstar's structured finance, corporate credit, and financial institutions ratings business. Before being named President of Morningstar Credit Ratings on February 13, Grow was responsible for development, implementation, and maintenance of the ratings and surveillance process for residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS), asset-backed securities (ABS), collateralized loan obligations, and single- family rental securities, as well as management of the related analytical teams. To date, Morningstar has issued a total of 400 rated structured finance transactions representing nearly $250 billion in issuance. Before joining Morningstar in 2011, Grow spent 10 years in RMBS and ABS ratings and research a Standard & Poor's. During that time, he formed and managed the rat- ing agency's RMBS criteria and modeling team, which developed and proposed new approaches to identify and model risk in RMBS transactions. He has also worked for JPMorgan Chase Bank and Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton, a law firm in New York. Grow holds a bachelor's degree in economics from St. Lawrence University and a master's degree in business administration from Yale University. How would you summarize Morningstar's approach to business? Our whole idea and why we're here is to be very flexible and very responsive. Usually, we get to see different asset types first, and we're always intellectually curious. e goal here is really to solve problems and identify risks, and that's what we love to do. What does a typical day look like for you? First thing in the morning, when we overlap with Indian time, I have a hand-off call with our Mumbai analyst team. Having a U.S. and Mumbai team ensures we are working 24 hours a day. We will talk about what got done overnight, and the U.S. employees will pick it up at that point. I oversee everything that is not commercial real estate, so on some days, we'll have a staff meeting where we go through all of the live deals and then talk about news and what's coming down the pipeline. I'll usually field the phone calls from issuers or investors, and then I spend a lot of my day problem solving with anything that comes up in transactions, and I'll work with our analysts to solve those problems. I also spend a lot of time focused on regulatory and compliance matters, making sure that we're following all the rules and then training my analysts on this. Many weeks we have a diligence visit where we'll visit coun- terparties to these deals, such as originators or servicers. at's what a typical day and week look like for me. Your day sounds busy and varied, what do you consider the most rewarding aspect of your role? e constant learning. Learning new asset types is what got us involved with single-family rental—we heard about it, and then we dove in and learned everything we could. It's the same with all other ABS asset types. I love studying different businesses and a whole business deal, and there's just a constant learning curve when you're a rating analyst. What criteria does Morningstar use when initially rating a pool of loans? It always depends on the asset type. For consumer assets, like residential mortgages or auto loans, we'll look at borrower characteristics—a borrower's FICO score; their debt, income, and other assets; if they have any cash reserves, etc. FIVE MINUTES WITH GET TO KNOW INDUSTRY EXECUTIVES BEYOND THE BOARDROOM "After the financial crisis, many borrowers who were struggling had their loans modified, and then these loans either re-defaulted or became current. Now, we are starting to securitize those re-performing loans." Brian Grow President, Morningstar Credit Ratings, LLC