Data Commoditization in the Securitization Markets (Part 3)

Today we proceed with the third installment and continuing discussion of the RMBS data industry with a section on “Loan Data Vendors”.

2. Loan Data Vendors – these are data vendors who specialize in the collateral (loan) information. This seems to overlap with component #1 item C (in blog entry 2 of this series), and to some degree it DOES overlap, however, Intex has not been known for providing the level of loan detail and in particular, ongoing historical monthly payment information that a proper Loan Data Vendor provides. Intex does provide monthly collateral information but it can be quite difficult to see and/or analyze it from an historical perspective. This thereby creates a market “niche” that various companies have stepped into in order to capture this need. Examples include Loan Performance (this is the largest and most well-known of the loan data vendors) , Black Box, ABSNet (Lewtan), Lender Processing Services, S&P and others. Most importantly this component includes at least the following:

a. Loan Data: this includes many fields of information relating to the actual loan itself including such things as original balance, current balance, purchase price of the property, zip code, state, MSA (Metropolitan Statistical Area), loan purpose (purchase, refinance or cash out), occupancy status (primary residence, investment property); documentation of income or assets, sale price, loan to value ratio, first or second lien, interest rate, loan type (fixed rate or adjustable rate mortgage), if an ARM loan, then what index does the loan reference, Interest Only period (if any), any prepayment penalties and for how long, loan modification details and so forth.

There are over 20 million loans within non-agency securitized deals so you can see that this is a fairly large data set.

b. Historical monthly payment records. These records tell you each month whether the borrow has paid and if so, how much; if the borrower is delinquent and how many days (30, 60, 90+); whether the loan is in foreclosure proceedings and, if it has already been foreclosed, how long it has been in REO. Also, when the property has been liquidated and whether there have been any losses and so forth.

Some loan data vendors provide web-based tools that you can use to query their loan data but many firms also license to routinely receive the data from the loan data vendor onto their own computer systems because they have mortgage research groups who want to be able to analyze the data in depth in order to assist them to predict the future performance of the loans based on what the historical data shows. This provides only a partial picture of the borrower and the property serving as collateral. See the next section for an extremely important additional piece of the puzzle.

**Watch for our next post describing “Enhanced Loan Data Vendors”.

Data Commoditization in the Securitization Markets (Part 2)

Today we continue our discussion of the RMBS data industry with a brief section on “Deal Data Vendors”.

1. Deal Information Data Vendors – by this we mean those data vendors that provide information about deals which includes:

*Overall deal information (Deal name, issuer, investment banker, servicer, trustee, whether the deal is Prime, AltA, Subprime, Original and Current Deal Balance, Cleanup-Call details, etc)
*Tranches (cusips, tranche names, original and current balances, coupon information, writedowns, ratings, credit support, etc)
*Collateral data (loan-level details, loan originator, collateral group related information and historical payments, etc)
*Triggers (primarily cumulative loss and delinquency triggers)
*Hedge Information (interest rate swaps, monoline bond guarantees, etc)
*Historical performance (especially useful for deal surveillance purposes)
*and so forth

A notable example of a data vendor who has all of the above is Intex. This is the most familiar and most widely used vendor of deal information in the industry. There are others including ABSNet (Lewtan) and Markit that also provide this information, but none to the degree that Intex does. Intex has been the longest and most firmly entrenched player in this space and consequently, the most costly.

Whereas it’s true that Intex provides deal information inside deal files and that these files are routinely delivered to a properly licensed client’s own file server, these files are made up of “one deal per file” therefore it becomes quite difficult to compare deals or query across all subprime deals and so forth.

What is really necessary is for a client to have software that reads all of the data about the deals (as enumerated above) into a proper database which can then be queried and analyzed with the purposes of spotting trade ideas or opportunities or generating various reports.

Note that this component does NOT include Bond Analytics – see the 5^th component for more data about Analytics Providers)

**Watch for our next post describing “loan data vendors”, coming soon.

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