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With pioneers of peer-to-peer lending tapping more institutional investors and competing to claim how boring their products are, the hype in alternative lending may be fading. That's good news, but only for those that have already reached scale. -
The business model of marketplace lender SoFi can sometimes sound like the subject of a grim corporate dystopia. The fintech start-up is not only in the business of selling loans — it wants to bring millennials on board from early adulthood until death, through relationships and home-building.
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Efforts to paint the European ABS market as a simple, bank dominated funding tool to charm nervy rule makers underplay the importance of the market for complex, bespoke deals for private equity firms. Each sort has its merits.
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The highly dysfunctional and hostile political environment in Washington, DC is making it difficult to pass any real financial regulatory reform, limiting Congress’s ability to enact meaningful change.
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Private equity firms have jumped on the recent rally in ABS spreads to dust off loan portfolios for public syndication. The structures are bespoke, and the deals are one-offs — a far cry from the market being just another funding tool for banks. But that's OK.
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The emergence of a rare tobacco settlement securitization deal in the US this week should raise questions about the perversity of these deals.
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Total European Central Bank asset purchases may have topped €1tr, but the much maligned ABS purchase programme is still barely treading water. Loosening the bank’s buying criteria might help, if central bankers are serious about the scheme.
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It’s not just the level of delinquencies in subprime auto ABS — which in March hit a record high — that threatens to put the securitization industry back in the spotlight of public disapproval.
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Janet Yellen’s August 26 speech at the Jackson Hole Economic summit once again suggested the imminent arrival of rate hikes, but it’s an act which the market is beginning to tire of.
