Dutch covered bond issuers are using an RMBS reporting initiative as the basis for a national transparency template to fulfil ECBC Label Convention guidelines, a representative of one of the issuers told The CBR, with standardised information about products backed by Dutch mortgages the overall aim.

National transparency templates (NTTs) are the transparency pillar of the European Covered Bond Council (ECBC) labelling initiative, designed to meet calls for greater transparency from bodies such as the International Capital Market Association (ICMA) Covered Bond Investor Council (CBIC), which is launching its own transparency standards, as well as regulators and the European Central Bank (ECB).

The Norwegian Covered Bond Council in March became the first national industry body to publish a template for covered bond reporting in response to the ICMA CBIC initiative, with representatives from other jurisdictions giving updates on their responses at an ECBC plenary in March and an ICMA CBIC & The Covered Bond Report conference in May.

After the launch of a website for the Dutch Association of Covered Bond Issuers (DACB) two weeks ago, Thijs Naeije, ALM/treasury at ABN Amro, spoke to The Covered Bond Report about Dutch covered bond issuers’ plans to fulfil transparency standards set out by the ECBC and ICMA CBIC.

“Dutch issuers already publish on a monthly basis a lot of information about their cover pools,” he said, “and we try to be as transparent as possible and are using the CBIC initiative to harmonise reporting.

“This adds value to the product, so we support the initiative.”

More concretely, according to Naeije the Dutch covered bond issuers have turned to a national initiative for an RMBS reporting template as the basis for designing a covered bond transparency template.

“Based on the RMBS template we agreed how the national transparency template for covered bonds should look like, as our goal is to have consistent reporting about products backed by Dutch mortgages,” he said. “The template is very much in line with the RMBS initiative. It has the same format and the tables and headers follow the same order.”

Aiding the Dutch in their efforts to harmonise reporting is that almost all the issuers use the same software to produce their monthly investor reports, added Naeije, with Hypoport the firm charged with building the covered bond transparency template.

“Around 90%” of the cover pool and covered bond information that the CBIC is requesting be disclosed will be reported under the Dutch NTT, according to Naeije.

“The CBIC information will be in our reports, but not in the same order,” he said. “Our focus is on the cover pool assets and less about the issuer.

“We decided on this to be in line with the RMBS template.”

Another consideration was a desire to stick to a monthly frequency of reporting and producing a single type of report, said Naeije, which would not have been possible because issuer information is not available on a monthly basis.

The CBIC’s transparency standards are divided into two main sections, general issuer data and cover pool data, with the investor body having in October decided that data should be reported on a half yearly basis after issuers report their results.

“For us it would be a step back to report on a semi-annual basis,” said Naeije, “and publication of multiple reports would be confusing.”