Securitisation lawyers have been hard pressed since the financial crisis, diversifying their practices and often even ditching the S word.
However, relief has been increasingly at hand in the last two years as the thinking of regulators and policy-makers has swung from seeing the financing tool as a cause of the banking crisis to key for getting more investment into the economy. Highlighting this shift at a speech to the Global ABS 2015 conference in Barcelona in June, the Bank of England’s executive director of prudential policy David Rule gave public backing to proposals to create EU-wide criteria for simple, standard and transparent (SST) products, a move he said would ‘play an essential role in de-stigmatising European securitisation, helping the market to develop on a sustainable track and attracting a broader investor base’.
