Aside from the product itself, you need three things to make a securities market work - issuers, investors and liquidity. So far, as its recent growth demonstrates, the European asset-backed market has had all these in abundant supply.

Issuance this year is expected to exceed or at least total $100bn (&euro111bn), yet ABS syndicate teams insist they are unconcerned by a potential imbalance between the increased supply and the availability of investor funds. If anything, they say, it is far more likely that investor appetite for asset-backed instruments will actually exceed the levels of supply - not altogether a bad problem to have in a relatively immature market.