There is an old idea making new waves on Wall Street. Banks of all stripes are once again moving risk off their balance sheets, in line with the demands of their prudential regulators, to make room for taking on more risk.
These so-called “credit risk transfers,” or CRTs, enable banks to sell only the risks associated with various loans, or pools of loans — but not the loans themselves — to third-parties willing to assume those risks and take the associated rewards, or so they hope. They are also known as “significant risk transfer” or SRTs. “One of the major growing pains for this market is that no one can decide on a name. The product is known by different names in different places,” notes law firm A & O Shearman.
The intermediaries for such deals include the likes of Guy Carpenter, a division of the huge insurer Marsh McLennan, as well as some big Wall Street banks themselves. For a fee, they transfer some of the risk on banks’ balance sheets to the likes of Apollo Global Management, Blackstone, and Bayview Asset Management, among others, who like taking on the risk generated by others, hoping to profit from it.