A special purpose entity (SPE) is another name for a special purpose vehicle: a company, trust or partnership created to carry out a single, narrowly defined task, usually to hold particular assets and issue debt against them while remaining legally separate from the organisation that set it up. The main entry describes how these vehicles are structured and used.
The two terms mean the same thing. "Special purpose entity" has been the more common wording in the United States and in accounting literature, while "special purpose vehicle" is usual in Europe and in banking and capital markets practice. Bank capital rules use a third variant, the securitisation special purpose entity. Accounting standards have added their own vocabulary: US rules refer to variable interest entities and international standards to structured entities, in each case to decide when a sponsor must include the entity in its group accounts under consolidation accounting.
Such entities are central to securitization, where assets are moved to the entity through a true sale securitisation, and they are also used in project finance, aircraft leasing and the issue of sukuk. The term became widely known after the collapse of Enron in 2001, which had used unconsolidated entities to keep debt out of its accounts.