12/15/2025
Well I’ve been saying the end is nigh for quite some time, and now, that moment has surely come. “There are no deals in the pipeline” says the Concept ABS website, probably for the first time since January.
There was one trade to talk of however, the £300m Equity Release Mortgage (ERM) securitization from Stonehill Credit, a subsidiary of the Murdoch Family Office, known as EQR 1. The ERM loans were originated by L&G Home Finance.
It’s the third UK ERM securitization of the year, which is once again rated by ARC Ratings and Moody’s. However, like the deals before it, EQR 1 was entirely preplaced.
My hunch is that we’ll see a fair few more ERMs next year, but I’m still sceptical about whether that means those trades will be publicly marketed, in large part because it’s often a trade that only needs a couple of investors.
But with that, I think we can safely assume that little else will be impacting the FY2025 league tables. Which brings us nicely on to the real focus of this week – The Freshly Squeezed European ABS FY25 Report Card, Part 1!
Hopefully, this will be the first of many annual reviews from the ARC Analytics/Freshly Squeezed team, but there’s so much I wanted to cram in here that I’ve made the executive decision to split it up into a two-part series.
This week, I’ll be looking at an arranger league table and performance in ABS by country. Next week, I’ll be finishing it off by looking at asset classes and spreads.
To start off, I have created an ex-CLO League Table for the banks, below.
This is ranked by number of deals with the total € (equivalent) shown too. The data I used was from Concept ABS, and as the title suggests, I have excluded CLOs, although retained ABS trades are included.
When at GlobalCapital, December to February was always the time for awards pitches. And every year, I found it amazing how many of the banks could tweak the same dataset in their favour.
So, while I acknowledge that there are plenty of potential reasons why one bank has more deals than the other, I posit that it’s generally the best barometer of who’s actually king of the arrangers.
By way of example, Deutsche Bank are 11th in the deal count list, but by virtue of doing a €30bn retained trade, they would be top of the pops with 13 deals and a total €39bn of issuance volume, which seems to me quite unfair on BNP Paribas!
Another one of my frustrations though has always been that CLOs is included in final league tables. Not out of some weird dislike for the product, just that the market participants are often totally different. Many banks have separate syndicate desks and structurers, while a CLO investor is not always an ABS investor (and vice versa).
Similarly, Jefferies are one of the top arranging banks in CLOs, but don’t make the top 10 in ABS. What harm is there in having two separate league tables?
But anyway, what of the league table itself? Clearly, BNP Paribas stand alone by some distance at the top, and we have come to expect that from the biggest EU bank. Although, I think it is worth highlighting the journey that Santander has been on the last few years, led by Matt Cooke.
2021 was a great year for the ABS market, but Santander were only 9th in league tables, running just 20 deals. Fast forward to now, and they’re up in second with double the amount of trades, much of that coming from a better internal system whereby their consumer finance branches around Europe come to market.
It’s a similar tale for Lloyds Bank, who have essentially trebled their workload since 2021 with 35 deals v 12 back then. Led by Miray Muminoglu, their return to the market as an originator with Permanent but also as a force to be reckoned with on the arranging side has been a great endorsement of the future of ABS.
Seeing more and more big name banks like Santander and Lloyds retaking an interest in the securitization market is perhaps what gives me greatest optimism for the years ahead.
The likes of SMBC, ING, and MUFG are just the latest who appear to be more focused on muscling their way to the top of these league tables, so hopefully, that’s a sign that 2026 will continue with recent trends and break the issuance record yet again.
Below we have the regional data and the deal type data. The UK is down year-on-year by about €7bn, while Spain broke through €10bn for the first time, its previous best being around €7bn in volume. It’s also been a great year for Italy, which is also a hair’s breadth away from that €10bn mark for the first time in 10+ years.
I guess the first question that comes to mind is “what’s gone wrong in the UK?”, and while I have heard of investors being a bit more downbeat about the UK economy than anywhere else, I’m not sure I buy that. Mainly because the UK economy has been doing whatever it’s doing now for quite some time.
You could argue that the potential removal of Starmer and Reeves makes it more likely that there’d be a left-wing equivalent to a Liz Truss LDI event in 2026…but a week is a long time in politics, so that seems like far-fetched investor caution.
The bigger thing to remember with the UK is its numbers are often propped up by gargantuan legacy RMBS deals which make the issuance figure look way higher. There hasn’t been much or any of that this year. And in addition, the UK Auto industry was basically closed for over 6 months with a court case hanging over it.
On the other hand, the storming success of Italy, and in particular, Spain has helped cancel out the UK’s shortcomings.
Traditionally, securitization in Europe has been dominated by a few big players like the UK and Germany. But while Italy and Spain are part of that top tier, they are perhaps perceived to be more cyclical, and more volatile markets.
Their success this year points towards further maturation, and in a year where both countries outstripped the Netherlands and France, it looks like the core, always on, markets could be starting to expand.
The challenge for next year is to back it up!
That’s all from me this week. Tune in for Part 2 (and the final edition of 2025) next Monday.
Have a great week,
Tom
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