Benchmark prior transactions, bonds, loans or company profiles using over 300 credit metrics.

Comparables

AI transcripts & instant analysis, making earnings season easier than ever.

Earnings

A full suite of ESG data and analysis. Built for your workflow

Spot undervalued credits and potential future restructurings with our purpose-built tools.

Distressed and Restructuring

Full Financial profiles with 3 statements, KPIs, segment splits & credit metrics. All traced to source documents.

Financials

New deal analysis and covenant comparison tools, understand key risks in seconds not days.

Covenants

Say goodbye to CTRL + F with our powerful search. Thousands of documents text searchable for any keyword or phrase.

Search

We've successfully predicted more than 65 price sensitive events - before they happened.

Deal predictions

We use AI to aggregate newsflow from 2,000 sources, and deliver it to your inbox quicker than anyone else.

News

Track high yield deals from issuance through to maturity, with integrated legal, credit and ESG analysis.

High Yield Bonds

Shine a light on private markets with 9fin's news and legal analysis of syndicated loans

Leveraged Loans

21st century tech and expert analysis to help CLO teams make informed decisions faster.

Structured Credit 

Find information others can't see in one of the fastest growing corners of finance

Private Credit 

Owen Sanderson

Excess Spread is our weekly newsletter, covering trends, deals and more in structured credit and ABF.

We have a smorgasbord of year-end content coming out of 9fin’s asset-based finance team, which has grown a staggering 300% in 2025 (from, uh, one).

I’ve taken a look at some of the scandals, frauds and failures in the year (the infamous cockroaches). We’ve written plenty about these as they’ve been unfolding, but part 1 draws some common themes together, while part 2 looks at the fallout, the possible defences, and managing frauds in the future.

Celeste has written the definitive piece on the year the regulators came for SRT repo — who’s out, who’s still down, who’s charging more — and looking at other alternative structures as well.

It’s looking like an emerging instance of unintended consequences. In squeezing a simple tool that’s been used to finance bonds since bonds were invented, the creativity of credit structurers has been unleashed. It’s not like leverage is going away, it’s just getting more complicated and less transparent.

Marta looked at fund finance, which is seeing record volumes in rated products, and a burst of creativity, as the big brains of private credit and structured finance crowd in to what was once a simple bank relationship market. Spreads are squeezed, structures are getting cuspy, but the fund finance train shows no signs of stopping.

There’s plenty to read above, but here are a couple of other interesting nuggets this week.

Arranger Lloyds closed a third challenger bank deconsolidation trade this week, for Cynergy Bank (coming hot of the heels of Shawbrook’s Ealbrook Mortgage Funding 2025-1 at the end of November and Chetwood Financial’s Chetwood Mortgage Funding 2025-1 at the beginning of November). It’s a debut deal, but it’s also startlingly innovative on structure.

We’ve done a bigger paywalled piece on the transaction, but it represents an innovative piece of financial engineering — solving for Cynergy’s unusual customer needs while achieving deconsolidation treatment.

Cynergy’s lending book features low LTV amortising loans to professional landlords — who come back, again and again. When the loan term is up, they don’t switch to SVR — they either stay with the bank and refi, leave, or the loan is accelerated. Most stay, and the structure of the deal therefore had to accommodate the bank’s desire to offer flexibility to customers, with its need for growth capital through deconsolidation.

Deconsolidation is a hard needle to thread, but essentially you can only do it once — you can only deconsolidate loans that exist.

The structural fix involves a short-term funding line that effectively allows the SPV to buy further advances without touching Cynergy’s balance sheet. This sits at the top of the waterfall and doesn’t provide active credit support, but means that Cynergy can grow its lending with its customers’ businesses, while keeping the deconsolidation treatment. Product switches for the same borrowers can also be funded in the deconsolidation deal.

The particularly cool thing is the tantalising prospect that this can work for other asset classes. Credit card deconsolidation has long been an aspiration for structural artistes (and for UK banks which want to free up capital) but it’s very hard to achieve, because a credit card is a revolving funding line — it’s tricky to sever it completely from the originator.

We’ve talked about the challenges associated with the NewDay and PayPal UK portfolio sales, which prove that it can be done, but neither deal was exactly straightforward, and both were corporates rather than banks.

If the Cynergy structure works for credit cards, it would be something like this: consider each new credit card drawing somewhat similar to a further advance in the mortgage structure, funded by a very carefully structured originator facility at the top of the waterfall. Each borrower’s bundle of loans (each credit card payment) is packaged into the deconsolidation SPV day 1 — and new drawings remain off balance sheet, funded by the securitisation and not by the originator. A credit card deal has to handle some other product-specific problems — those pesky customers that pay their cards off and incur no interest, as well as how to allocate the payments — but we are confident that smart heads can solve these problems.

The Cynergy deal is going to be the first of many — as 9fin reported last month, Cynergy has hired former Lloyds deconsolidation specialist Blake Foster into a new role as head of capital markets. The deals are to be named for UK innovators, beginning with computing and mathematics pioneer Ada Lovelace.

Lloyds has had quite the run of arranger mandates on deconsolidation trades, and part of the reason, we understand, is that its considerable expertise doing its own deconsolidations has been shared with client challenger banks, with Lloyds willing to do the hard accounting work.

That said, Ibrahim Bundu-Kamara (ex-Bank of England, ex-Morgan Stanley) had been one of the top in-house deconsolidation specialists, and, as first reported in 9fin, has now headed to BofA (though he stuck around to see Shawbrook and Cynergy get done).

BofA is no slouch at mortgage financing and RMBS structuring more generally, and, we’d hazard a guess, has more trading and underwriting balance sheet to play with. Will the mandates follow the man? Find out in 2026!

The other item we thought was fascinating was the announcement last week that Cerberus is transferring SEK430bn of non-performing loans to Brocc Finance, a former Swedish peer-to-peer lender it bought only last month.

SEK430bn of unpaid balances (yep that’s billlion with a B) is about €40bn, and these were unsecured NPLs, so the purchase price is probably pennies.

As some of loans come from Cerberus’s backstop of Intrum, formerly Europe’s largest corporate debt purchaser, we can put a finger in the air for ultimate price — Cerb bought an Intrum back book for circa 3% of unpaid balance last year.

But that still gives a value of roughly €1.2bn, which would catapult Brocc straight into the big league of Europe’s bad-debt managers.

Cerberus knows a thing or two about investing in European NPLs, so it’s worth watching it closely.

It seems pretty clear it bought Brocc for this specific purpose; it closed the acquisition at the end of October, installed a Cerberus MD as chief investment officer, and immediately went about pivoting the business to turn Brocc into a permanent capital NPL-buying vehicle.

The trade relies on an obscure wrinkle in the EU’s Banking Package, which came into force in January 2025. This creates a new category of European bank, the Specialist Debt Restructurer.

That’s banks that intentionally want to buy NPLs, rather than creating them as an unfortunate byproduct of ordinary lending.

Regular banks are subject to the EBA’s NPL backstop, which forces them to take a capital deduction if the NPLs hang around too long (three years, for unsecured).

The idea was to get southern Europe’s institutions to hurry up and sell, but it was extremely penal to, for example, Hoist, a Swedish institution which made it an intentional business.

Hoist used a selection of securitisations and joint ventures to wriggle around the impact of the backstop, while some of the Italian banks with a similar business model (Guber Banca, Banca Sistema, Banca IFIS) diversified their business lines, pushing into private credit and factoring.

The SDR status comes with extra responsibilities. Banks cannot be too large (less than €20bn in assets) and must hold higher levels of regulatory liquidity, with the net stable funding ratio set at a higher level.

In effect, Hoist was one of the only institutions to which the status could apply, and Hoist ended up mired in a struggle over interpretation between the EBA, local regulator the SSFA, and Hoist itself — the question was basically whether Hoist could apply the new status immediately, or whether it had to demonstrate SDR-eligible characteristics for the year beforehand.

Hoist expects to get approved by year-end, and touts a formidable 3.5% cost of capital as a reason why it will be a successful bidder for European NPL books.

But Brocc also expects to get the status soon — in effect, it’s a EU-backed way to get the cheapest possible capital, bank deposits, into the NPL buying game.

The Brocc story is particularly symbolic because of the assets involved, which include part of Intrum’s book. For a decade, high-yield-funded debt purchasers were the best bid for unsecured NPLs, but now the trade has collapsed. Intrum has been through two restructurings (Swedish and Chapter 11), Lowell has been through one and is on its second, iQera has collapsed, AFE has collapsed (both absorbed by Arrow Global, which managed a canny pivot to private-debt fund manager).

Rising rates cut the present value of long-dated NPL cashflows, while also dragging on funding costs, as the corporate debt purchasers refinance bond maturities. Funds like Cerberus can plug a gap, but these have traditionally focused on secured NPLs, rather than the high volume high tech world of collecting small balance unsecured.

Deposit capital provides the ideal alternative — and Cerberus has made a smart move to access it.

Which securitisation stalwart bought Santander’s landmark Spanish mortgage deal

Quilam’s first entry to the UK auto market

Zenith Leasing’s RV struggles aren’t over

All the details of the European Parliament’s securitisation draft

What did ABN pay to protect its portfolio with Blackstone?

BNP Paribas closes year with a blaze of SRT trades

🍪 Our Cookies

Excess Spread — NPL banks, forward-flow fusion

Read all our public content for free

Recently Published

Cloud 9fin — Distressed Diaries — Ghost of restructurings past

Beyond the model: how we’re making AI in debt markets work at scale

9Questions — David Rosenberg, Oaktree — Thriving in a credit picker’s market

Ardagh and Altice tested CDS in 2025 — But are they on nice or naughty list?

What are you waiting for?