Miracle on Sonnemannstrasse Street: ECB launches fast-track assessments for capital and securitisation

The European Central Bank announced an early festive gift on 19 December 2025 which enables a "fast-track" of SRT securitisations with a supervisory response in eight working days, compared to ordinary reviews of up to three months.  

To be eligible, the transaction must meet certain objective criteria, including: 

• capital reduction on CET1 must not be more than 25 bps;
• total aggregate notional amount of the securitisation is less than €8 billion;
• portfolio needs to be in a performing and granular situation (at least 100 exposures and single obligor concentrations not in excess of 2%);
• no leveraged loans above 20% of the pool;
• credit protections should be contingent on the outstanding amount of the protected trance and should not feature guaranteed premiums, rebate mechanism or other mechanism that avoid allocating losses to the investors;
• early termination clauses with standardised wording.

Various structural safeguards are also required such as, for example, verification agent in synthetics, mitigation of risks of type or currency in traditional securitisation and that at least 15% of tranches that are neither risk weighted at not 1,250% nor deducted from CET1 items are sold to external investors to demonstrate that they have been correctly priced.

This should hopefully have an immediate and positive impact for banks supervised by the ECB (i.e. categorised as SIs) from as early as January 2026.