Regulation 2017/2401 - Amendment of Regulation (EU) No 575/2013 on prudential requirements for credit institutions and investment firms - Main contents

EN

Official Journal of the European Union

L 347/1

Securitisations are an important constituent part of well-functioning financial markets insofar as they contribute to diversifying the funding and risk diversification sources of credit institutions and investment firms (‘institutions’) and releasing regulatory capital which can then be reallocated to support further lending, in particular the funding of the real economy. Furthermore, securitisations provide institutions and other market participants with additional investment opportunities, thus allowing portfolio diversification and facilitating the flow of funding to businesses and individuals both within Member States and on a cross-border basis throughout the Union. Those benefits should however be weighed against their potential costs and risks, including their impact on financial stability. As seen during the first phase of the financial crisis starting in the summer of 2007, unsound practices in securitisation markets resulted in significant threats to the integrity of the financial system, namely due to excessive leverage, opaque and complex structures that made pricing problematic, mechanistic reliance on external ratings or misalignment between the interests of investors and originators (‘agency risks’).

In recent years, securitisation issuance volumes in the Union have remained below their pre-crisis peak for a number of reasons, including the stigma generally associated with such transactions. In order to prevent a recurrence of the circumstances that triggered the financial crisis, the recovery of securitisation markets should be based on sound and prudent market practices. To that end, Regulation (EU) 2017/2402 of the European Parliament and of the Council (4) lays down the substantive elements of an overarching securitisation framework, with criteria to identify simple, transparent and standardised (‘STS’) securitisations and a system of supervision to monitor the correct application of those criteria by originators, sponsors, issuers and institutional investors. Furthermore, that Regulation provides for a set of common requirements on risk retention, due diligence and disclosure for all financial services sectors.

In accordance with the objectives of Regulation (EU) 2017/2402, the regulatory capital requirements laid down in Regulation (EU) No 575/2013 of the European Parliament and of the Council (5) for institutions originating, sponsoring or investing in securitisations should be amended to adequately reflect the specific features of STS securitisations when such securitisations also meet the additional requirements laid down in this Regulation, and to address the shortcomings which became apparent during the financial crisis, namely mechanistic reliance on external ratings, excessively low risk weights for highly-rated securitisation tranches and, conversely, excessively high risk weights for low-rated tranches, and insufficient risk sensitivity. On 11 December 2014 the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (the ‘BCBS’) published its ‘Revisions to the securitisation framework’ (the ‘Revised Basel...