London-based Markit Group Limited, data vendor, portfolio valuation service and OTC derivative trade processing company, has acquired ABS Reports, an ABS deal reporting service.
Markit says ABS Reports is the only electronic reporting service to focus exclusively on the performance of European deals in the Asset-Backed Securities (ABS), Mortgage-Backed Securities (MBS) and Collateralised Debt Obligations (CDO) markets. The platform provides aggregated, detailed information for European ABS deals, with the aim of allowing users to monitor and analyse the performance of transactions in the public domain while tracking price and collateral throughout the life of a deal.
The service provides access to data including original and current standardised deal data; original servicer reports; deal documentation; securities pricing; an archive of more than 1,500 European transactions; and access to news and research.
Markit says it will integrate performance data from ABS Reports into its European ABS pricing service with a view to bringing greater efficiency and transparency to the secondary European ABS market. The combination of these services will offer an integrated suite of performance and pricing data, allowing for significant deal and sector analytics, says the company in a statement.
“Markit is deeply committed to the structured finance markets, and this acquisition is proof of our determination to provide the ABS community with high quality intelligence,” says Kevin Gould, Executive Vice President and Head of Data Products and Analytics at Markit. “By providing detailed information on the entire spectrum of European securitisation deals through a single gateway, we will enable dealers and investors to track the value and performance of the underlying assets quickly and efficiently.”
Markit’s ABS pricing service, which allows clients to track ABS values using independent, consensus pricing drawn from 25 market makers, now provides data for over 4,000 securities which marks a significant milestone since the launch of the service just over a year ago.
Giovanni Pini, Senior ABS Analyst at European Credit Management, says the introduction of Markit’s integrated ABS offering “will be warmly welcomed since there is a real need for timely, reliable and publicly available information. Markit has played an important role in bringing greater transparency and efficiency to the structured finance and derivatives markets, and their new service is certain to benefit the European securitisation industry.”