An Introduction

"We make no apology for enthusing about our own experiences. They're the only ones we've had..."

These are unprecedented times in the finance world, and whilst the public markets for structured mortgage-backed funding have all but gone away, such techniques continue to be used to facilitate access to the central bank financing that has been made available to help the industry navigate through some very turbulent waters.

Whether we’re talking about securitisation, covered bonds, or any other form of structured, secured borrowing or portfolio/whole-loan transaction, certain disciplines are required within your business to efficiently utilise these funding tools. In our experience, many lenders using these techniques to access financing are not fully aware of the functionality that they need to effectively run structured funding programmes and how the various areas of their organisation and the third parties they engage need to work together to achieve this aim. “We don’t know what we don’t know” is very appropriate in these circumstances.

You will undoubtedly receive first class advice on corporate strategy, asset and liability management, product pricing and hedging, data management, origination, servicing, structuring, documentation, auditing and accounting from within your business and the third parties you engage. However, there are very few in the industry who have had first-hand experience across a wide range of the functions and disciplines that need to work together effectively to make structured funding programmes strategically and operationally efficient.

Coleva Solutions is here to provide your business with input to any of these disciplines and to help you understand how they fit in to the ‘bigger picture’ of your structured funding programmes. We like to think of Coleva as the ‘intellectual glue’ that brings these elements of the process and the people involved in them together, and thinks about the nuances of implementation specific to your business, based on our years of practical, hands-on experience in UK mortgage lending and the subsequent growth in structured finance products backed by these asset classes. There are many idiosyncrasies embedded within the features of these programmes, which have become industry standards over the years; Coleva is proud to say that in many cases it was “in the room” when these matters were first discussed and therefore has an invaluable knowledge of why things were done as they were, and the pitfalls that need to be avoided.

Some of the blame for the sudden and dramatic loss of confidence in the system has been placed in the hands of structured funding mechanisms, although much of the less-sophisticated press makes no distinction between the more aggressive/opaque structures and the passive/transparent ones that, in Coleva’s view, are a natural, necessary and logical extension of retail lenders’ funding capabilities. A public market for these more transparent structures will return at some point, and Coleva can help future-proof your programmes in anticipation of accessing the wider market in due course.