Handbook: Transfers and servicing of financial assets
Handbooks | August 2025
Latest edition: Our in-depth guide to ASC 860 – with Q&As, interpretive guidance and examples.
Our in-depth guide explains how to account for transfers of financial assets – including presentation and disclosures – using Q&As and examples to address common questions and transactions that we see in practice. This August 2025 edition includes new and updated interpretations based on our experience with companies applying ASC 860.
Applicability
- All entities with transfers of financial assets
Relevant dates
- Effective immediately
An established model and evolving transactions
In the decades since the FASB first developed its guidance on transfers of financial assets, the capital markets – and the types of transfers that take place in them – have continued to evolve.
The accounting guidance has evolved as well, although the core principles have remained intact: a transaction is recognized as a sale when a financial asset has been transferred and control has been surrendered; and following a sale, a company measures both the benefits it controls and the resulting obligations.
This model is well-established, but the continued evolution of transactions involving transfers of financial assets often pushes the profession to make critical judgments about the application of the guidance.
We want to help you make those critical judgments.
In this Handbook, we navigate scope, deconstruct the sale criteria, and describe the accounting for both sales and secured borrowings. We seek to demystify securitization transactions and how to analyze repurchase agreements and securities lending. We also address the accounting for servicing assets and liabilities.
Report contents
- Executive Summary
- Scope
- Sale Criteria: Overview
- Sale Criterion: Legal isolation
- Sale Criterion: Actual control
- Sale Criterion: Effective Control
- Accounting for sales of financial assets
- Accounting for secured borrowings
- Special topics
- Servicing assets and liabilities
- Disclosures
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Transfers and servicing of financial assets
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