Markit announced that it is working with leading dealers to facilitate the distribution of European ABS prospectuses and investor reports.
In response to calls by the European Commission for greater transparency in the European ABS markets, Markit said that it is currently developing an industry-led solution encouraging best practice with the support of several dealers.
The dealers involved are the following: BNP Paribas, Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Lehman Brothers, Morgan Stanley, Royal Bank of Scotland and UBS.
According to a Markit release, it will consolidate prospectuses and investor reports for European ABS deals on a single Web site and will make the information freely available to all buy-side and sell-side firms and third parties, as permitted by local regulation.
This initiative shows that the structured finance industry is taking the lead in tackling the need for greater transparency in the European ABS markets today," said Amany Attia, managing director and head of European securitized products at Lehman Brothers. "A number of dealers have made a commitment to support Markits platform, and we hope that this greater availability of key deal and performance information will restore investor confidence in these markets.
We are pleased to be supporting Markits initiative which will address the European Commissions calls for greater transparency in the structured finance markets, and we look forward to working with the broader group to bring best practice to the European ABS markets, said Lee Rochford, head of fixed-income securitization for Europe at Royal Bank of Scotland.
"We welcome Markits initiative to launch an industry-led solution to provide freely accessible surveillance information for European securitisations," said Rick Watson, managing director and head of the European Securitization Forum. This will bring greater transparency to the European structured finance industry, and will work in concert with the ESFs own efforts to boost the availability of performance information in these markets.
This initiative is designed to provide greater transparency to investors in European ABS and will streamline the performance surveillance process," said Ben Logan, managing director of structured finance at Markit. "We also expect it to spur the development of analytics and valuations by third party providers which will ultimately bring greater price discovery and liquidity to the European ABS markets.
The release said that this initiative dovetails with data providers plans to launch Markit Valuations Manager, which the first global, multi-bank, cross-asset client valuations platform. Scheduled to go live in the second half of this year, it will offer clients increased transparency in OTC derivative and cash valuations by providing accurate and consistent third-party valuations on a single electronic platform.
