Securitization

With the summer holiday season fast approaching, now feels like a good moment to pause and take stock of developments in the European ABS market year-to-date.

Aza Teeuwen (Partner, Co-Head of ABS) and Elena Rinaldi (Portfolio Management) hosted a webinar on Wednesday 9 July 2025, where they shared insights into recent trends in global CLOs.

Collateralised loan obligations, or CLOs, have become an increasingly popular asset class within global fixed income.

Blog posts about regulation rarely trouble our most-read charts, but on this occasion we think the payback on time invested looks more compelling.

Last week marked another record-breaking year for the securitisation industry as over 5,500 market participants gathered in Barcelona for the annual Global ABS conference, surpassing last year’s attendance and reflecting the growing momentum across both public asset-backed securities (ABS) and private asset-backed finance (ABF) markets.

Following the introduction of the European Union’s securitisation regulations in 2013, the Australian securitisation market initially lagged behind in aligning with European investors’ standards. Over the past decade, however, the market has undergone significant changes and recent record issuance shows investors are increasingly seeing the opportunity in Australian ABS.

It has been two weeks since the primary market for collateralised loan obligations (CLOs) re-opened and 2025 has already proven to be quite a year from multiple angles.

With a macro backdrop of falling rates and solid global growth, TwentyFour Asset Management's Eoin Walsh says fixed income investors can expect healthy total returns in 2025.

Last week, members of TwentyFour’s asset-backed securities (ABS) portfolio management team were in Dana Point, California for the Opal Group CLO Summit, an annual event with over 2,000 participants made up of investors, bankers, CLO managers, service providers and lawyers.

After a horrible year for financial markets in 2022, the macro-outlook for 2023 had a lot of consensus views, with most predicting a much better year ahead, helped by supportive rate cuts from central banks and positive returns from both government bonds and credit.  

While European ABS was not immune to negative returns amid the considerable fixed income headwinds of 2022, it gave investors largely what they look to this allocation for – lower volatility and better performance than mainstream bonds. In our view, the forward-looking opportunity looks equally compelling.

We can debate whether the European Central Bank is behind the curve or not, but Christine Lagarde says rates will be in non-negative territory by September.