Moody's Analytics' ABS Suite helped T-Mobile prepare its data for securitisation - a substantial task for one of the world's largest telecommunication companies. The issuer says the platform provided clean data for its two asset types, readying securitisations for private issuance.

The underlying mobile contracts backing T-Mobile’s securitisations are small in dollar value but massive in number. The issuer maintains two privately placed revolving securitisations totalling about US$1 billion apiece, even though the nature of its mobile phone contracts is constantly changing in line with marketing campaigns.

“We like to do creative and exciting things, and ABS Suite has been able to keep up with all of them,” says Amber Carrasco, Seattle-based director, financial services at T-Mobile.

The borrower has been using ABS Suite since 2015. Carrasco says its ability to adapt to T-Mobile’s specialised needs was impressive. “We often work with IT partners with which it is difficult to get on the same page – but Moody’s knew exactly what we were trying to accomplish,” she tells ASJ.

Extracting and sorting through data from multiple sources then getting it into a format useful for investors was T-Mobile’s first challenge. “We have separate billing and loan-and-lease systems, but we need to pull data from both to calculate the outstanding balance,” Carrasco explains. “It does not sound complicated but the challenge is making sure we are capturing everything.”

She says ABS Suite helped set up the deals and get the data in. “We could easily see what we had available to sell that day,” she adds. “[ABS Suite] was able to work through the very complicated logic and the efficiencies gained were on the time we would have spent trying to figure this out manually. If we built this internally, it would take a couple of years.”

An in-house solution may have proved difficult to deliver during the pandemic, when regulatory changes meant T-Mobile needed to adapt its systems quickly. “We had to put collections on hold for some customers,” Carrasco explains.

It then became a case of working out how to identify these accounts within the system. “Moody’s helped us to get this up and running quickly and we were able to report on it within the first month,” she explains. “The response time was incredible, especially for something so urgent.”