High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Structured finance is a broad term used to describe a sector of finance that was created to help transfer risk and avoid laws using complex legal and corporate entities. This risk transfer as applied to securitization of various financial assets (e.g. mortgages, credit card receivables, auto loans, etc.) has helped to open up new sources of financing to consumers. However, it arguably contributed to the degradation in underwriting standards for these financial assets, which helped give rise to both the inflationary credit bubble of the mid-2000s and the credit crash and financial crisis of 2007-2009.