Ground Floor:  As you know, I like to keep an eye on how the sisterhood gets on in the financial services industry, given that women are still under-represented in the corner offices and at the boardroom tables.

Unfortunately, the spotlight on Ms Robin Saunders in the past few weeks hasn't exactly been positive; having reached the position of managing director of WestLB's European Asset Securitisation and Principal Finance Group, she's seeing it all implode as some of the racier deals which she and her team were involved in now begin to unravel.

Asset securitisation was a new-ish product (certainly in Europe) in the latter part of the 1990s and, because initially it wasn't seen as being madly glamourous, it was an area in which women were actively involved.

It sounds complicated but, like most things, it's not really.

Basically it involves looking at a future stream of income - like, for example, the payments that a bank might expect to receive from mortgage-holders - putting a value on that income stream and then packaging it all together as a single bond which can be sold to investors.

The benefit to the bank is that it gets revenue now and moves the mortgages off its balance sheet and the benefit to the investors is that they are paid a higher rate than government securities.

This particular type of securitisation is very popular with German mortgage banks, which call them Pfandbriefe.

In my bond days I occasionally traded in them and very satisfying they were too!

Although the concept started with mortgage income streams, you can pretty much package anything you like. In 1997, the market was buzzing with the first musical securitised bonds - known as Bowie Bonds - securitising the future royalties from David Bowie's songs. Most of the $55 million (€47 million) in bonds were privately placed but they were offering a premium for the investor and received a single A credit rating at the time.

Bankers suddenly realised that securitisation deals didn't have to be restricted to mortgage payments and that there was money to be made out of them, both by originating them (setting them up) or buying the bonds as investments.

Naturally, there's more money to be made in originating them, as the fees are usually a percentage of the ultimate value of the bonds.

Anyway Robin Saunders (Rockin' Robin according to some newspaper reports) was involved in originating deals for WestLB, most of which were securitised.

Newspapers like to write about certain women in business, seeming to like the contrast between what they think a business person should look like (steely and determined), and an attractive woman with a wide smile and some decent lippy. (They also like women who look younger than their stated age. If they have a husband and children somewhere in the background like Saunders, that's even better.)

Robin became a media-babe when she led the Formula One securitisation. The resultant bonds were known as Bernie Bonds and, like the Bowie Bonds, they captured the imagination of people outside the industry.

After that, almost every company that she looked at found itself in the spotlight and she was accused of courting media attention.

She became as famous for the deals that fell through (such as Railtrack and BT) as the deals that she finalised. But one of those deals, for a company called Boxclever, has gone horribly wrong, resulting in a loss of €650 million for WestLB.

The problem stems from an operation within Boxclever called Endeva, which is involved in installation and repair of televisions and which has gone into administration.

Unfortunately, the stream of income from Endeva is supposed to support Boxclever's debt. The Boxclever bond was for almost £750 million. Robin says that she just announced the deal and didn't have anything to do with it but it's obviously a case of the buck stopping at the top and she can't back away from it now.

The problem for her personally is that the media attention which was so welcome when she was putting together the deals is less welcome when things are going wrong and now there are stories about her personal life as well as the disaster at the bank.

The thing about securitisation, of course, is that like many other financial deals the pressure mounts to do more and more complex issues. They should be done on very defined future income flows but sometimes those defined numbers can be arrived at in a less-defined way.

Often, though, the packaging of such a deal can be presented so aggressively that an investor (and they're usually institutional investors) feels almost obliged to be part of the hype.

If we hadn't seen the sharp turnaround in the markets at the beginning of this decade, there's a likelihood that there would be a lot more structured finance packages out there now, but the hole that many investors found themselves in after March 2000 has made them more critical of new deals and more questioning about their ability to pay.

The high level of fees that were undoubtedly earned on the Boxclever deal and many of the other deals generated by Robin Saunders won't put enough of a dent in the losses now incurred to keep management in WestLB looking on the bright side.

However, Robin was astute enough in her dealings with the bank and she received a percentage of all of the fees that she brought in as well as a stake in many of the companies that she bought.

I have reservations about the wisdom of allowing bankers to acquire holdings in the businesses with whom they deal.

Offering huge incentives to people to bring in a deal can mean that the packages may not be as rigorously put together as they should be.

So, while WestLB is left looking at a hole in its P&L, Robin still holds part of BHS and Pubmaster.

She kept the number one rule of banking. Look after yourself.