In
finance
Finance is the study and discipline of money, currency and capital assets. It is related to, but not synonymous with economics, the study of production, distribution, and consumption of money, assets, goods and services (the discipline of f ...
, seniority refers to the order of repayment in the event of a sale or
bankruptcy
Bankruptcy is a legal process through which people or other entities who cannot repay debts to creditors may seek relief from some or all of their debts. In most jurisdictions, bankruptcy is imposed by a court order, often initiated by the debto ...
of the issuer. Seniority can refer to either
debt
Debt is an obligation that requires one party, the debtor, to pay money or other agreed-upon value to another party, the creditor. Debt is a deferred payment, or series of payments, which differentiates it from an immediate purchase. The ...
or
preferred stock
Preferred stock (also called preferred shares, preference shares, or simply preferreds) is a component of share capital that may have any combination of features not possessed by common stock, including properties of both an equity and a debt inst ...
. Senior debt must be repaid before subordinated (or junior) debt is repaid.
[The American Heritage Dictionary of Businessurt Publishing Company, 2010] Each security, either debt or equity, that a company issues has a specific seniority or ranking. Bonds that have the same seniority in a company's
capital structure
In corporate finance, capital structure refers to the mix of various forms of external funds, known as capital, used to finance a business. It consists of shareholders' equity, debt (borrowed funds), and preferred stock, and is detailed in th ...
are described as being
pari passu
''Pari passu'' is a Latin phrase that literally means "with an equal step" or "on equal footing". It is sometimes translated as "ranking equally", "hand-in-hand", "with equal force", or "moving together", and by extension, "fairly", "without pa ...
. Preferred stock is senior to common stock in a sale when preferred shareholders must receive back their preference, typically their original investment amount, before the common shareholders receive anything.
FpML
The seniority of bonds recognised in
FpML
FpML (Financial products Markup Language) is a business information exchange standard based on Extensible Markup Language (XML) that enables business-to-business over-the-counter (OTC) financial derivative transactions online by following W3C st ...
(Financial products Markup Language) are as follows:
See also
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Security interest
In finance, a security interest is a legal right granted by a debtor to a creditor over the debtor's property (usually referred to as the ''collateral'') which enables the creditor to have recourse to the property if the debtor defaults in makin ...
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Secured creditor
A secured creditor is a creditor with the benefit of a security interest over some or all of the assets of the debtor.
In the event of the bankruptcy of the debtor, the secured creditor can enforce security against the assets of the debtor and av ...
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Senior debt In finance, senior debt, frequently issued in the form of senior notes or referred to as senior loans, is debt that takes priority over other unsecured or otherwise more "junior" debt owed by the issuer. Senior debt has greater seniority in the is ...
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Unsecured creditor
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Preferential creditor
References
Bankruptcy
Corporate finance
Fixed income
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