As the reform and opening of China's financial sector continues, China's bankers and their regulators have become keenly interested in the potential of securitisation as a tool to help achieve their objectives of capital relief, risk transfer and balance sheet optimisation for commercial banks.
The four large state-owned commercial banks are under increased pressure to deal with their massive portfolios of non-performing loans NPLs. The same pressure is weighing heavily on the four asset management companies AMCs, which received a substantial infusion of pre-1996 NPLs from the banks in 2000 and have only six years left to dispose of the bulk of these aging assets. The banks have...