Across frontier and emerging markets, investors increasingly confront challenges in accessing secure, high-yield debt instruments amid regulatory tightening, heightened volatility and shifting macroeconomic conditions. Demand for innovative debt structures and bespoke trading platforms is in overdrive as supranational entities and institutional investors seek scalable solutions that balance risk and opportunity in these dynamic environments.
At the forefront of these developments is Claire Rich, an Emerging Markets Macro Trader at Seldon Capital. With prior leadership roles at Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, Rich applies her expertise in frontier FX, rates risk management and structured debt innovation to design first-of-their-kind financial products and build thriving trading franchises. Her work has enabled institutional clients to access new sources of yield while managing complex risks in frontier markets, helping bridge regulatory and liquidity gaps through groundbreaking callable bond issuances and structured trading platforms.
Her recent HackerNoon article, “The Dark Side of “AI Productivity”: How It Trains You to Be Replaceable,” explores the risks of overdependence on AI in financial roles, emphasizing the critical need for human judgment and creativity: the very qualities Rich leverages to innovate frontier market solutions.
Reshaping Opportunities in a Volatile Fixed Income Landscape
In 2023, the global fixed income markets experienced moderate gains amid ongoing inflation concerns and rate volatility. The SPDR Bloomberg Global Aggregate Bond UCITS ETF, which tracks broad investment-grade bonds worldwide, posted a 5.65% gross return for the year. In contrast, the U.S. 10-year Treasury yield ended the year near 3.9%, which reflects persistent inflationary pressures balanced by monetary policy tightening.
Turkey’s fixed income market, however, faced outsized challenges. The country’s official inflation rate, which had soared to 64.77% by December 2023, significantly disrupted market stability and investor confidence. Despite this, sovereign and corporate issuers raised an estimated $10 billion in external bond and sukuk financing in 2023, which demonstrates significant market resilience.
Navigating this complex environment, Rich collaborated with the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) to structure and issue Goldman Sachs’ first Turkey-denominated callable bond. This landmark transaction, which is Turkey’s first AAA-rated callable bond post-regulation, generated approximately $5 million in trading desk revenue, outperformed the GBI-EM benchmark and became the largest supranational bond issuance in Turkey at that time. “This transaction showed that even amid extreme market volatility, innovative structuring fosters client trust and delivers substantial revenue,” Rich explains.
Building Credibility in Structured Rates Trading Globally
The global OTC derivatives market experienced a steady growth in 2024, with total notional outstanding rising by 4.9% year-over-year to approximately $729.8 trillion by mid-year 2024, according to the Bank for International Settlements. Interest rate derivatives, the largest segment, grew slightly by 1% year-over-year to reach $579 trillion. Meanwhile, foreign exchange derivatives expanded significantly by 10% to about $130 trillion, alongside notable increases in equity and commodity derivatives.
Within this expansive market, Claire Rich successfully built a global structured rates franchise at Morgan Stanley, focused on bespoke trades tailored for frontier markets facing liquidity constraints. Her franchise grew revenues to $20 million within seven months, targeting $30 million by year-end, with steady-state projections between $70 and $100 million annually if scaled sustainably.
Her corresponding HackerNoon article, “AI’s New Way of Predicting Market Turns,” which covers advanced AI use cases in market forecasting, underscores the data-driven innovation increasingly vital to frontier structured rates trading. “Launching a global business in this complex and fragmented space demanded deep client insight and innovative product design,” according to Rich.
Creating Repeatable Frameworks in High‑Volatility Emerging Markets
Emerging market volatility remained a defining feature of global capital flows in 2023: net portfolio inflows into emerging economies hit $177.4 billion, which rose to approximately $274 billion in 2024, courtesy of a Reuters’ report of the Institute of International Finance’s findings. Many emerging market currencies experienced notable fluctuations, and sovereign risk spreads widened sharply, with EMBI Global indices rising by more than 100 basis points during stress periods.
The size of emerging market debt has grown significantly over the past decade: hard-currency sovereign debt nearly doubled to $1.4 trillion and local currency debt rose substantially, which reflects increasing complexity in risk management.
In this context, global trading desks faced pressing demands for tailored risk modeling frameworks, especially in high interest-rate emerging market currencies where conventional risk models often failed. Rich’s pioneering work on Turkey callable bonds exemplifies this innovation: she developed a Bermudan option risk model in a volatile currency environment, which is a sophisticated structure that had hitherto never been modeled internally at Goldman Sachs. This innovation established a repeatable methodology for analyzing callable products under volatile market conditions, thereby reducing structural costs and enabling new issuances. “When markets are most volatile, transparency and backtesting become the only way to win trust,” says Rich.
Driving Scalable Franchise Growth in Frontier Markets
Frontier market debt has steadily increased, with the JPMorgan NEXGEM Index capturing approximately $120 billion in US dollar‑denominated sovereign debt as of December 2024. The NEXGEM serves as the premier benchmark for frontier sovereign bonds, which represents a specialized subset of the broader emerging market debt universe. Although smaller than broader indices like JPMorgan EMBI GD ($1.3 trillion+), the NEXGEM reflects the capital‑scarce and high‑yield nature of frontier markets with an average credit rating around B+. Despite growth, default risks remain elevated across frontier sovereigns and investor challenges are compounded by rising cross‑currency hedging costs.
For product teams, this meant that supranational and callable structured instruments became critical tools for bridging international creditor demand with local borrower necessity. Firms that could design scalable, repeatable instruments were best placed to grow their client franchises in these capital‑starved regions.
Claire Rich’s leadership in both the EBRD callable bond structure and the global structured rates build‑out demonstrated scalability as a differentiating capability. Her contributions extended beyond single‑transaction wins: she established frameworks that could be applied systematically in other frontier contexts, hence positioning her desk for repeat long‑term growth while strengthening client trust. “My focus has always been to design tools that go beyond a single trade,” she shares. “By prioritizing scalability, every deal becomes a stepping stone for stronger client partnerships.”
