Our Thoughts from Global ABS 2024

Invisso hosted the annual Global ABS conference in Barcelona from 4-6 June 2024. The event was a huge success and their largest to date with over 4,800 delegates attending the conference as well as their new Private Credit summit. The conference was insightful and all attendees had ample opportunity to connect with colleagues and other industry professionals around topical and interesting panel discussions. Members of the Maples Group's Global Finance team from Dublin, London, Jersey, Luxembourg and The Netherlands were delighted to attend the conference. This note summarises our thoughts and key takeaways from the conference.

1. The addition of the Private Credit Summit on Day 3 was very welcome. The intersection of regulated funds, fintech platforms, leveraged asset-backed lending, fund finance and securitisation has been central to our own growth for a number of years now given our core global client base, our strategic alignment across our global footprint to their own structuring, legal, administration and compliance needs and our cross-specialism and cross-service line approach to how we serve our clients. Coming developments in areas such as AIFMD 2 loan origination, the ELTIF 2.0 product and CRD VI bank-lending and securitisation regimes represent a continuation of the blending of expertise required to successfully implement these strategies and transactions.

2. SRT stays hot! Reflecting our own experience, issuers, investors and leverage providers love this asset class right now. Traditionally a market which talks in terms of partnership and collaboration between the issuer and investor, some gentle competition between more established players and newer entrants was discernible – a natural feature of an expanding market, and it was interesting to see which firms were learning the fastest in this space.

3. Core products such as CLOs and RPLs/NPLs continue to provide healthy transactional volume for all participants. We are starting to see the EU CLO refi/reset market come to life and expect a busy second half of the year. Primary RPL/NPL processes continue to emerge from the banks while secondary trading, RMBS exits, restacks and calls are keeping everyone busy.

4. New Asset Classes and ESG – from data centre securitisations to solar panels and handset deals, there was plenty of evidence that when the conditions are right (including the regulatory overlay) securitisation is a tool valued by new originators. Whilst some of this activity can be considered as green, sustainable or transition-financing, overall ESG was a more subdued theme this year. Hopefully, this is best-considered a brief ESG breather due to overall market busyness and, once the Green Bond Standard comes online in Q3 all the hard work being done to advance ESG capabilities in the meantime will add new impetus to the market then.