Mortgage-backed securities: Why India shouldn't fear their debut as a leap into the unknown
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. India’s financial ecosystem quietly crossed an important threshold in May 2025 with the launch and public listing of India’s first Mortgage-backed Pass-Through Certificates (PTCs), issued by LIC Housing Finance and structured by RMBS Development Company Ltd, on the National Stock Exchange (NSE). The transaction was modest in size but significant in meaning.
For the first time, Indian home loans were transformed into a transparent, exchange-listed instrument with market price discovery. In a system long dominated by bank balance sheets, this was a small but meaningful widening of the path for housing finance. The case for deepening India’s mortgage-backed securities market rests on the sheer scale and quality of housing finance itself.
Outstanding housing loans now exceed ₹30 trillion, comprising about one-fifth of total non-food bank credit, and have grown at a steady 12–14% annually over the past decade, driven by urbanization, household formation and rising formal incomes rather than speculative excess. Asset quality has remained robust, with home-loan delinquencies typically well below 2% even during stress. However, this large, long-term and stable asset class is funded in a strikingly narrow way, with over 85% of housing credit staying on the balance sheets of banks and housing finance companies, financed largely through deposits and wholesale borrowings.
Securitization plays only a marginal role, with total annual volumes of ₹1.5–2.5 trillion across all assets and residential mortgages accounting for just 15–25% of that flow. In stock terms, securitized housing loans are only a low single-digit share of outstanding credit. The result is a growing mismatch in which long-dated,
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