ABN AMRO announces EUR 4.9 billion Dutch SME loan securitisation
ABN AMRO has launched SMILE 2007 – a EUR 4.9 bln true sale cash securitisation transaction of Dutch loans to small and medium-sized enterprises that priced today.
“The securitisation programme is a next step in our capital management,” said Hugh Scott-Barrett, ABN AMRO’s Chief Financial Officer. “With this transaction we will reduce regulatory and economic capital in a very efficient way while transferring part of the credit risk on the Dutch SME loan book.”
The transaction, named SMILE 2007, is the third SME loan securitisation under the SMILE programme and follows a highly successful EUR 5 billion cash SME securitisation in 2001 (SMILE 2001) and a EUR 6.75 billion synthetic SME transaction in 2005 (SMILE 2005). The transaction combines the replication of certain synthetic aspects of the 2005 deal with the strengths of a true sale cash securitisation.
The resulting SMILE 2007 structure is designed to maximise economic and regulatory capital efficiency in the context of both the Basel I and Basel II frameworks, and thus contributes towards ABN AMRO’s on-going capital management objectives.
“We have structured a hybrid transaction to optimise the efficiency of Basel II and economic capital relief. At the same time, the transaction provides investors with notes backed by an asset class with a strong credit history and therefore pricing is very attractive,” said Marcel Klopper of ABN AMRO Group Asset-Liability Management.
In particular, the capital structure, which represents a refinement over the previous SMILE deals, only requires a credit enhancement of 15 bps of annual guaranteed excess spread, with all notes placed in the market i.e achieving almost full credit risk transfer on the portfolio:
| Class | Rating* (Fitch/S&P/Moody’s) | Size (mln) | Proportion | Spreads |
| A | AAA/AAA/Aaa | 4,564 | 93.0% | 9 bps |
| B | AA+/AA/Aa2 | 98 | 2.00% | 15 bps |
| C | AA-/A/A1 | 74 | 1.5% | 25 bps |
| D | BBB+/BBB/Baa2 | 74 | 1.5% | 53 bps |
| E | BB-/BB-/Ba3 | 83 | 1.7% | 250 bps |
| F | (Unrated) | 15 | 0.3% | 1000 |
* Provisional and subject to final confirmation from Fitch, Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s.