Basel Committee Publishes Report on Synthetic Risk Transfer Markets

In its 18 February 2026 report on "Synthetic Risk Transfers," the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision found that SRT transactions have grown rapidly over the last decade, and SRT investors constitute an important source of capital relief for corporate credit risk. The report analyses the structures, market trends, regulatory treatment, and risks associated with  SRTs, including a cross-jurisdictional analysis of how banks transfer credit risk to third parties while retaining ownership of underlying assets.

SRTs are used by banks for capital relief and optimising regulatory and economic capital needs. SRTs provide investors with exposure to loan portfolios underwritten to the standards of the issuing banks while avoiding origination and  servicing costs for investors.

The SRT market has grown substantially, with protected assets in Canada, the Euro Area, the United States and the United Kingdom estimated at approximately EUR 750 billion, representing 1.1% of total bank assets. The investor base is dominated by non-bank financial intermediaries ("NBFIs"), including private credit funds, hedge funds, pension funds, and insurance companies.

In essence, SRT transactions involve transferring all or a portion of the credit risk of a pool of assets to a counterparty while the bank retains ownership of the underlying assets.  The BIS report gives insights into various approaches to supervisory and regulatory treatment. SRTs must meet eligibility requirements, including operational and legal criteria to ensure the effectiveness of the credit risk transfer. The proportion of risk-weighted assets that must be transferred by the bank to third parties to obtain regulatory capital relief varies depending on the jurisdiction. Other than certain specific exceptions in the United States, there are generally no limits on the aggregate amount of capital relief that can be obtained through SRTs.

In many jurisdictions, supervisors reserve the right to review and challenge the eligibility of capital relief for specific SRTs throughout the duration of the transaction. Supervisors may elect to require higher risk weights under the transaction, impose restrictions on the bank's use of SRTs or not recognise the risk transfer, resulting in less or no capital relief.

Currency and maturity mismatches between the underlying exposures and the protection provided reduce the effectiveness of credit risk mitigation. As such, for currency mismatches, supervisors adjust protection effectiveness based on the share of reference portfolio loans in mismatched currencies. For portfolios with exposures of different maturity dates, supervisors require the bank to use the longest residual maturity for the entire portfolio. Banks must therefore carefully monitor the nature and possible extensions of the underlying assets, which may affect the entire portfolio’s residual maturity.

SRT financing refers to bank-provided financing to protection providers, e.g., through repo transactions where the bank lends against SRTs in the form of credit-linked notes (which the protection provider had previously purchased from a SRT issuing bank) as collateral. Regulation of SRT financing is still in early stages as supervisors try to determine appropriate prudential approaches to address associated risks. Such financing may already be regulated through a few explicit limits in current Pillar 1 requirements or via higher capital requirements imposed by the authority of supervisors. Both the ECB and the EBA have recently made public statements on SRT financing being an area of focus due to its rapid growth and potential risks to bank resilience.

Banks may use SRTs for purposes other than regulatory capital relief, such as for internal credit risk limit management and supervisors generally do not set explicit limits on such uses.

Key concerns for supervisors with respect to SRTs are ensuring that capital relief is commensurate with the actual risk transferred (and not simply recognising capital benefits without genuine risk reduction) and monitoring the potential for high bank dependence on SRTs, which may increase procyclicality of credit provision and interconnectedness with NBFIs, especially if protection providers become unwilling or unable to offer coverage during downturns. Additionally, supervisors are focused on understanding and addressing risks from bank financing of SRT protection providers, which can reduce the extent of actual risk transfer from the banking sector and expose banks to credit and counterparty risk backed by illiquid, hard-to-value collateral. Banks considering SRTs may consider certain precautions described below to alleviate these concerns.

• Alignment: Banks can mitigate rollover and concentration risks by aligning maturities of SRTs and underlying loans, staggering SRT maturities, diversifying protection providers, and utilising funded SRT transactions.
• Risk Management: Banks which fund investors in SRT transactions can mitigate credit risk by applying prudent haircuts and limits, assessing the liquidity of SRT collateral, and refraining from accepting their own SRTs as collateral.
• Oversight: Supervisors may continue to monitor SRT use and resilience under stress conditions—with the option to limit capital relief, increase Pillar 2 requirements, or restrict SRT use where capital relief is not commensurate with the risk transfer achieved.
• Transparency: Pillar 3 disclosure requirements could be enhanced to include more granular public data on protected portfolios, SRT investors, and transaction costs. This would address the current gaps in understanding the impact of SRTs on banks’ risk profiles.
• Investor Due Diligence: Investors can mitigate risk by screening bank origination and credit management practices at inception and during the lifetime of the transaction.

However, the efficacy of such risk mitigants has not yet been tested by large-scale credit losses and SRT markets are opaque to regulators and participants.

The report also warns of increased demand by SRT investors, which may lead to pressure to weaken loan origination standards, amplifying credit cycles and undermining resilience.

Supervisors are encouraged to continue to carefully monitor growth in SRT usage relative to the potential risks highlighted in the report. The increased interconnectedness of banks and NBFIs via the SRT market may warrant closer cooperation and coordination between banking supervisors and regulators and supervisors of NBFI entities, to ensure that financial stability risks are addressed in a timely manner.