India’s central bank amended its Master Direction – Reserve Bank of India (Securitisation of Standard Assets) Directions, 2021, to disallow securitisation of "Loans with residual maturity of less than 365 days", on 5th December, 2022. Amit Kumar Gupta, founder and Chief Investment Officer of Equity Research Firm FinTrekk Capital, tweeted that this "implies loans with residual maturity <365 days cannot be securitized. This will impact MFIs, Gold finance companies and many fintechs." What is securitisation: Securitisation involves pooling together various risk assets (like loans) and redistributing them into tradable securities, which are sold to investors. These securities can be repackaged with assets from different risk profiles (like high risk, low risk, etc). Why it matters: If loans with a residual maturity of less than 365 days will not be allowed to be securitised, this will reduce the volume of tradable securities available in the market but the quality of securitisation will improve, Amit Kumar Gupta, a SEBI registered Research Analyst, told Medianama. Anshul Gupta, co-founder and Chief Investment Officer at Wint Wealth said in a tweet that, "This will affect Microfinance, Gold loan and Personal loan companies significantly & render lot of their portfolios unsecuritisable!" Background: RBI issued its Master Directions on Securitisation and Standard Assets in 2021, which were praised for giving more securitisation options. They reduced the minimum holding period of loans that can be securitised from 12 months to 6 months. The RBI had also reduced the minimum amount of loan to be retained on the book from 10 %…
