Korea's biggest insurance company, Samsung Life Insurance, which also has significant real estate and research and development businesses, has selected Morgan Stanley to lead manage its and the country's first cross-border residential mortgage backed securitization RMBS later this year.
Lehman Brothers and Samsung Securities have been brought in as co-arrangers on the transaction, which will securitize at least $500 million of mortgage loans from Samsung's own portfolio.
The exact size of Samsung's mortgage business is difficult to ascertain because the company does not include a breakdown of different loan types in its annual reports. However, its overall loan business had grown to $13.25 billion by the end of 2000, around $9 billion of which is...