In the opening session at the Australian Securitisation Forum, Marion Kohler, Head of the RBA's Domestic Markets Department, outlined some of the early insights from the Bank's "securitisation dataset".  One such finding was that advertised and unadvertised discounts to reference rates were "commonplace", and these have increased in recent years."Since mid-2015, we have required that, in order to be eligible as collateral for transactions with the Reserve Bank, detailed information about the assets underlying the security and its structural features be made available to us and more broadly to permitted data users," Kohler said."The securitisation dataset allows us, along with other investors in asset-backed securities, to undertake a rich analysis of the securities they hold and more accurately assess their risk and pricing than would be possible without this information."The RBA currently receives data (with a one-month lag) on 1.6 million individual mortgages each month. These mortgages have a total value of around A$400 billion, about one-quarter of the total value of housing loans outstanding in Australia, according to Kohler. Around 100 data fields are collected for each mortgage, covering a broad range of variables including loan characteristics, borrower characteristics and details on the collateral underpinning the mortgage.Comparing owner-occupier and investor loans separately, the RBA's data showed distribution of loan size was similar for the two groups but with a greater proportion of large investor loans."This could reflect the tax incentives for investors to take on and sustain more leverage than owner-occupiers, maximising the amount of funds borrowed and limiting repayments. But it also reflects that investors ... typically have higher incomes than those with owner-occupier loans and so have a greater borrowing capacity," Kohler said."The second point of interest is the very recent large decline in interest-only loan shares in self-securitisations, which is consistent with changes in the broader stock of outstanding mortgages; these declines have occurred alongside measures by APRA to limit new interest-only lending,' she said.As well as tracking and confirming trends over the past two years, The RBA's data also called into question the relevance of the standard variable rate."Standard variable rates or package rates ... do not necessarily reflect interest rates actually paid, since banks typically apply unadvertised discounts," Kohler said. "The Securitisation Dataset includes the actual interest rate paid on each mortgage and so can provide both timely and granular insights into housing interest rates that are not available from many other sources."A typical package mortgage product has additional features beyond the 'basic' mortgage (such as an offset account) and may be bundled with other products (such as a credit card). Packages often include advertised discounts. A large share of loans has an interest rate consistent with the average package rate; however, the majority of loans have an interest rate below the average package rate. For the major banks, the interest rates on most loans are within the range set by the advertised specials rate and the package rate. Preliminary econometric analysis suggests that LVRs and loan size are important determinants of the discount offered to