On September 3, 2020, the remaining regulatory technical standards (RTS) of the Securitization Regulation completed their scrutiny period and were confirmed and published by the European Parliament in the Official Journal[1]. This legislative act comes one year and nine months after the Securitization Regulation formally entered into force and thus formalistically completes the transition from the current regulatory regime into the new one. The approved RTS will enter into force on September 23, 2020 and will bring substantial changes to the market mechanics. The following text was compiled in order to help the reader to better understand the market impact.

On Friday January 17, ESMA opened a period on assessment of data completeness of Securitization Disclosure. The consultation paper can also be accessed on ESMA’s web site.

Dear readers,

The first year of our blogging activities concerning Securitization and Structured Finance Issues is over. We have received quite some feedback from you and would like to thank you accordingly. Knowing that our topics are of interest to the Securitization community is key for us and guides us to compile not only informative but also relevant posts.

Therefore, our first post of 2020 will provide you with a short recap of what happened in 2019 and our expectations of the key market developments for 2020. We welcome your input on this and will provide you with an update on our expectations at the end of this year. As always, we take a regulation-driven look and analyze its effects on market developments.

Stephan, Philipp & Petr

The objective of this article is to explain how private[1] securitization can obtain the STS label by complying with the legal disclosure requirements. Following paragraphs aim to outline areas of concern to any reporting or in other way designated entity that wishes to issue and maintain STS label for its securitization. According to Article 7 (2), it is the originator, sponsor or special purpose entity that shall make the data available to third parties. As the interpretation logic between ABCPs and non-ABCPs does not differ significantly, for the purposes of this paper, we further continue with analysis of STS criteria for short-term[2] securitizations only.

Why new templates?

The European Securitization Regulation that came into force in January 2019 requires data disclosures for most securitizations originated in Europe. Compliance with the disclosure requirements will mean submission of an official set of templates of loan-level data to a securitization repository, a process that has some similarities with the disclosure of derivatives transactions under EMIR. The Regulation bestows ESMA with the power to develop the templates which then have to be endorsed by the EU Commission (EC), adopted by European Parliament and finally be published in the Official Journal as a European regulation. Only after this, the templates will become mandatory for all securitizations issued after January 1, 2019.

As of beginning of 2019, the new Securitization Regulation applies. It consists of 48 articles and brings forth several noteworthy rules, concerning mostly disclosure practices and Simple, Transparent and Standardized (STS) framework.

The STS Framework

The STS refers to a set of criteria that grant an STS label to a compliant ABS transaction. The requirements are described in articles 18 – 28 and can be broken down as follows: