Illustration: Hit&Run
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The role of the banks in today’s securitization market is very different to what it was in the run-up to the great financial crisis. Banks no longer load assets onto their own balance sheets with a view to securitizing them.
There is no more ‘originate to distribute’, the grand name for the strategy behind so much of the dysfunctional lending that drove the sub-prime residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS) crisis.
Today banks provide funding to a growing army of private and buy-side institutions that make the loans, and the banks then arrange securitization exits for them.
“We are going back to a model that worked pre-crisis, where banks are no longer the aggregators of assets,” says the global head of securitization at one top five US ABS bank. “Asset managers are aggregating loans, and the role for the bank has moved from provider to facilitator.”
In essence, securitization has gone back to what it was always supposed to be.
