ASF Proposes New Investor Reporting Standards

The American Securitization Forum has begun its next phase of a project aimed at restoring investor confidence in the moribund market for mortgage- and asset-backed securities that includes a proposal for monthly servicer reporting on deals through maturity. The group, as part of its ongoing Project on Residential Securitization Transparency and Reporting, released a request for comment on its new residential MBS reporting package for the securities that sets guidelines aimed at making the performance of their underlying loans easier to track. The reporting package consists of a proposed package of data fields set to be updated monthly by RMBS servicers throughout the life of an RMBS deal and distributed to investors and credit rating agencies. The ASF, in conjunction with its conference in Las Vegas, also has released for comment a revised version of last year's proposed RMBS disclosure package, a 135-field package of pool and loan-level information that was designed to be used when RMBS deals are initiated and aimed at allowing investors to more easily compare loans and transactions across all issuers and perform some key loan-level analysis. The ASF said it also has issued a set of recommended data fields for manufactured housing securitizations and addressed issues involving information about modifications, second liens, fraud, the definition of "full documentation" and standard terms and identifiers designed to avoid confusion. Both packages include similar recommendations for file naming conventions and were designed to complement each other.