It was fitting that the €6.7bn ($6.7bn) Scip II transaction, led by ABN Amro, BNL, JP Morgan and Citi/SSSB, helped the European ABS market to finish the year with a flourish, for a number of reasons. First and most obviously, the sheer size of the Italian government's property-backed deal made it the largest securitisation to have been presented to the European investor base, rounding off another record-breaking year for the asset class.

As Merrill Lynch points out in the introduction to its Review of the European Structured Credit Sector in 2002: "It has become almost routine since 1996 to state each year that the market has reached new heights in issuance volume. So it was in 2002 with a total volume of about $200bn."