本条目所指“资产证券化”仅指狭义的资产证券化。

自1970年美国的政府国民抵押协会（Government National Mortgage Association，GNMA，俗称Ginnie Mae），首次发行以抵押贷款组合为基础资产的抵押支持证券——房贷转付证券（Mortgage Pass Through Certificate，MPT），完成首笔资产证券化交易以来，资产证券化逐渐成为一种被广泛采用的金融创新工具而得到了迅猛发展，在此基础上，现在又衍生出如风险证券化产品。

Securitization is the financial practice of pooling various types of contractual debt such as residential mortgages, commercial mortgages, auto loans or credit card debt obligations (or other non-debt assets which generate receivables) and selling their related cash flows to third party investors as securities, which may be described as bonds, pass-through securities, or collateralized debt obligations (CDOs). Investors are repaid from the principal and interest cash flows collected from the underlying debt and redistributed through the capital structure of the new financing. Securities backed by mortgage receivables are called mortgage-backed securities (MBS), while those backed by other types of receivables are asset-backed securities (ABS).