The Board’s objective in issuing the amendments in this Update is to respond to stakeholders’ concerns about current accounting and disclosures for repurchase agreements and similar transactions. Stakeholders expressed concern that current accounting guidance distinguishes between repurchase agreements that settle at the same time as the maturity of the transferred financial asset and those that settle any time before maturity. In particular, repurchase-to-maturity transactions are generally accounted for as sales with forward agreements under current accounting, whereas typical repurchase agreements that settle before the maturity of the transferred financial asset are accounted for as secured borrowings. Additionally, current accounting guidance requires an evaluation of whether an initial transfer of a financial asset and a contemporaneous repurchase agreement (a repurchase financing) should be accounted for separately or linked. If linked, the arrangement is accounted for on a combined basis as a forward agreement. Those outcomes often are referred to as off- balance-sheet accounting.
The full FASB update is available here.