Briefs: CommBank CBA hit by all-day mystery outage, ASIC''s new client money rules, RMBS deals launc
Commonwealth Bank customers had a choppy time of it yesterday (4 April) with the activist website aussieoutages.com reporting the first notifications that the CBA system was down had started by 8.04am. Not all customers or all businesses were affected, though. Nevertheless, some 10 to 12 hours later, operations had not been fully restored, and still no explanation was forthcoming, leading industry professionals to question the effectiveness - via specialist news sites such as Finextra - the effectiveness of CBA''s disaster recovery plans. Analysis of the complaints to the Aussie outages website showed the parts of CBA''s operations most prone to problems (ie, the most often reported services) were: NetBank (52 per cent); ATM and cards (42 per cent); Commbiz (5 per cent). ASIC's client money reporting rules and other similar reforms started on 4 April 2018 under the Treasury Laws Amendment (2016 Measures No. 1) Act 2017 and the Corporations Amendment (Client Money) Regulations 2017. The changes severely restrict the circumstances in which an AFS licensee may use 'derivative retail client money', within the meaning of the Corporations Act. In particular, AFS licensees can no longer withdraw client money or use it as their own working capital. The reforms also impose new record-keeping, reconciliation and reporting requirements on AFS licensees, with few exceptions. Two prime mortgage-back securitisations are being marketed to fixed income investors this week. An indication of what is expected can be found in two presale releases from Fitch, covering: APOLLO Series 2018-1 Trust's floating-rate notes, backed by a pool of around A$800 million in first-ranking Australian residential full-documentation mortgage loans, originated by Suncorp-Metway, with the top three classes of notes seeking to raise approx. $720 million; and the Light Trust 2018-1, seeking at least $470 million in funding via mortgage-backed pass-through floating-rate bonds, with a collateral pool comprising $532 million in prime Australian residential mortgage loans originated by People's Choice Credit Union.