ASF Seeks to Rebuild Investors' Confidence.

Byline: Jennifer Harmon

New York-The American Securitization Forum has launched ASF Project RESTART, an industry-developed initiative to help rebuild investor confidence in mortgage- and asset-backed securities, restore capital flows to the securitization markets and, ultimately, increase the availability of affordable credit to borrowers.

The first phase of the project is a proposed ASF RMBS Disclosure Package, which standardizes and expands existing issuer disclosure to investors and credit rating agencies, particularly on mortgage loan-level information. It is geared towards producing a uniform set of data that are reliable, understandable, consistent and equally available to all market participants.

ASF says the package will enable investors to more easily compare loans and transactions across all issuers and perform necessary and sufficient loan-level analysis to evaluate RMBS transactions on the basis of the features and performance of the underlying mortgage loans. The same loan-level detail will aid credit rating agency evaluations by enhancing the quality, consistency and comparability of information relating to securitized assets.

"The initiative will help identify specific and necessary steps towards actionable solutions that are designed to revive investment now, in response to the current crisis, and promote well-functioning markets over the long term as the securitization process evolves," said Tom Deutsch, deputy executive director of the ASF.

RESTART, Residential Securitization Transparency and Reporting, is a collaborative effort of ASF members and others in the market to find industry solutions. The project's members identified, in the first phase of the project, over 130 specialized sets of core pool and loan-level data fields useful in rating and evaluating a pool of mortgage loans in an RMBS transaction.

Under the proposed package, issuers will collect and provide additional data for specialized types of loans. The data fall into categories, including general information, loan type, mortgage lien information, loan term and amortization type, adjustable-rate mortgages, pledged prepayment penalties, borrower information, borrower qualification, subject property, loan-to-value and HUD-1 information.