Sector developments and company hires

Solar LDA partnership inked
dv01 has partnered with GoodLeap with the aim of further promoting data transparency and accountability within the solar ABS market. Through this partnership, dv01 will serve as loan data agent (LDA) for Carbon Level Mitigation Trust (CLMTE) pass-through certificates.

The shelf currently comprises CLMTE 2021-1 and CLMTE 2021-2, with an aggregate notional value of US$53.6m at issuance across 1,252 residential solar loans. As LDA, dv01 handles the monthly deal reporting by cleansing, validating and standardising loan-level data. Qualified platform users, including participating investors, can then leverage fully integrated analytics tools through the dv01 web app to extract actionable insights on loan performance.

In other news…

EMEA
Starling Bank has recruited Damian Thompson as chief asset management officer, based in London. He is tasked with growing the bank’s asset base in line with its deposit growth, while recognising that some of these assets will be originated by Starling and some will be originated externally by third parties. Thompson was most recently head of UK fixed income origination and solutions at NatWest, but has a securitisation background, having previously worked in European ABS at Fitch.

TPD student loan discharges unveiled
The US Department of Education (ED) last week announced US$5.8bn in automatic total and permanent disability (TPD) discharges on federal student loans for over 323,000 borrowers. The forgiveness will apply to borrowers who are identified through an existing data match with the Social Security Administration (SSA) and begin with the September quarterly match with SSA. In addition, the ED will stop asking for income documentation and eliminate the three-year monitoring period for TPD discharge applicants.

The move removes the need for borrowers who are identified through administrative data matching to fill out an application before receiving relief. The ED removed this application barrier in 2019 for borrowers identified as eligible for a TPD discharge through the match with the US Department of Veterans Affairs.

However, it had not yet done so for those identified through the data match with SSA. As a result, only about half of borrowers identified as eligible for TPD through the SSA match have received the discharge.

With this TPD action, the Biden-Harris Administration has now approved approximately US$8.7bn in student loan discharges for roughly 455,000 borrowers. In addition, the ED has extended the pause on student loan repayment, interest and collections to 31 January 2022, which affects 41 million borrowers.