Over the past few months, you’ve heard from me and fellow members of the Versana team as we’ve moved out of stealth mode, shared our insights on key issues in the loan market and made our public debut at the LSTA Conference. It’s all led up to this. Today, we are thrilled to announce the launch of our industry-backed syndicated loan platform, providing a centralized, digital foundation for market innovation and collaboration.
It’s official: the Versana platform is live and ready to make an impact.
By digitally capturing deal data from agent banks’ books and records in real time– we are delivering transparency, efficiency and velocity to a market that has long been dominated by manual processes. And by enabling greater straight-through processing, we are laying the groundwork for the long-awaited digital transformation from which banks, institutional lenders and their service providers will all benefit.
This milestone is a result of tireless work – not just from our own team, but from our partners as well. Our founding investors – J.P. Morgan, Bank of America, Citi and Credit Suisse – are fierce competitors by day, but with Versana, they’ve became symbiotic collaborators by night. These market-leading firms know better than anyone the operational and technological challenges that have historically held the syndicated loan market back from even greater growth, and they decided to do something about it.
Their resources and insights have been paramount, with senior business leaders and their teams working closely with us to provide key inputs. Today, our platform is in active use at three of these firms, with Citi set to follow early in 2023. This level of engagement is exactly what is required for this market to reap the full benefits of our platform, and now we’re seeking to drive that engagement across the industry.
One of the reasons we’re so confident in our platform is that every stakeholder can benefit from it in some way. No matter where you sit in the loan market ecosystem, every institution needs to know its exposures and cash flows in real time. We’re delivering self-service capabilities and unprecedented transparency into the granular loan details that define this space: borrower commitments and outstandings, transaction history, current positions and interest accruals on a fund-by-fund basis, base-rate contract details and more. And with a cloud-native architecture, comprehensive set of APIs and easy implementation process, we’re starting to make the asset class frictionless, so you can focus on borrower risk profiles and credit decisions.
Now that we’re live, we’re already looking ahead to the future. In addition to our four founding investors, we are working toward connectivity with other agent banks so we can aggregate data from their systems. We’re also engaging with fund managers and have formed two buy-side advisory committees – one focused on operations, the other on front office – laying the groundwork for their future platform use. And we are still hiring aggressively across all parts of the business, particularly our in-house technology team.
As powerful as our offering is now, we are continuing to build every day toward something even greater. With reliable, real-time data, workflow efficiencies across the loan lifecycle and the flexibility to support future advancements, our clients will be positioned to achieve long-term, scalable growth – from originations to AUM. It’s a lofty goal, but an achievable one, as evidenced by the extraordinary level of interest among those who have heard our story and vision.
So, while it’s an amazing milestone for our team, and I thank them all, today’s launch is monumental for the loan market at large, and is just the first step in a truly exciting journey. There’s much more to come, and I hope you’ll watch to see what we do next.
