Let us have a securitization party

The concept of securitization is very versatile. From Wikipedia:

Securitization is a structured finance process that distributes risk by aggregating debt instruments in a pool, then issues new securities backed by the pool. The term “Securitisation” is derived from the fact that the form of financial instruments used to obtain funds from the investors are securities. As a portfolio risk backed by amortizing cash flows – and unlike general corporate debt – the credit quality of securitized debt is non-stationary due to changes in volatility that are time- and structure-dependent. If the transaction is properly structured and the pool performs as expected, the credit risk of all tranches of structured debt improves; if improperly structured, the affected tranches will experience dramatic credit deterioration and loss. All assets can be securitized so long as they are associated with cash flow. Hence, the securities which are the outcome of Securitisation processes are termed asset-backed securities (ABS). From this perspective, Securitisation could also be defined as a financial process leading to an issue of an ABS.

The cash flows of the initial assets are paid according to seniority of the tranches in a waterfall-like structure: First the claims of the most senior tranche are satisfied and if there are remaining cash flows, the claims of the following tranche are satisfied. This continues as long as there are cash-flows left to cover claims:

Individual securities are often split into tranches, or categorized into varying degrees of subordination. Each tranche has a different level of credit protection or risk exposure than another: there is generally a senior (“A”) class of securities and one or more junior subordinated (“B,” “C,” etc.) classes that function as protective layers for the “A” class. The senior classes have first claim on the cash that the SPV receives, and the more junior classes only start receiving repayment after the more senior classes have repaid. Because of the cascading effect between classes, this arrangement is often referred to as a cash flow waterfall. In the event that the underlying asset pool becomes insufficient to make payments on the securities (e.g. when loans default within a portfolio of loan claims), the loss is absorbed first by the subordinated tranches, and the upper-level tranches remain unaffected until the losses exceed the entire amount of the subordinated tranches. The senior securities are typically AAA rated, signifying a lower risk, while the lower-credit quality subordinated classes receive a lower credit rating, signifying a higher risk.

In more mathematical terms, securitization basically works as follows: take your favorite set of random variables (for the sake of simplicity say binary ones) and consider the joint distribution of these variables (pooling). In a next step determine percentiles of the joint distribution (of default, i.e. 0) that you sell of separately (tranching). The magic happens via the law of large numbers and the central limit theorem (and variants of it): although each variable can have a high probability of default, the probability that more than, say x% of those default at the same time decreases (almost) exponentially. Thus the resulting x-percentile can have a low probability of default already for small x. That is the magic behind securitization which is called credit enhancement.

So given that this process of risk mitigation and tailoring of risks to the risk appetite of potential investors is rather versatile, why not applying the same concept to other cash flows that bear a certain risk of default and turn them into structured products 😉

(a) Rents: Landlords face the problem that the tenant’s credit quality is basically unknown. Often, a statement about the tenant’s income and liabilities should help to better estimate the risk of default. But this procedure can, at best, serve as an indicator. So why not using the same process to securitize the rent cash flows and sell the corresponding tranches back to the landlords. This would have several upsides. First of all, the landlord obtains a significantly more stable cash flow and depending on the risk appetite could even invest in the more subordinated tranches. This could potentially reduce rents as the risk premium charged by the landlord due to his/her potentially risk averse preference could be reduced to the risk neutral amount (plus some spreads, e.g., operational and structuring costs). The probability of default could be significantly easier estimated for the pooled rent cash flows as due to diversification it is well approximated by the expected value (maybe categorized into subclasses according to credit ratings). Of course, one would have to deal with problems such as adverse selection and the potentially hard task to estimate the correlation – which can have a severe impact on the value of the tranches (see my post here).

(b) Sport bets: Often these bets as random variables have a high probability of default, e.g., roughly 50% for a balanced win/loss bet). In order to reduce the risk due to diversification a rather large amount of cash has to be invested to obtain a reasonable risk profile. Again, securitizing those cash flows could create securities with more tailored risk profiles that could be of interest to people that are rather risk averse on the one hand and risk affine gamblers on the other hand.

(c) …

That is the wonderful world of structured finance 😉