The accomplishment highlights the budding digitization of private credit, though it’s still a long road ahead.
By Nyela Graham
See below for excerpts from a recent WatersTechnology feature. For the full article, see here.
Spend any amount of time discussing the loan market with those who have spent more than a decade inside it, and they are likely to highlight its lack of modernization. For a market that saw US institutional loan issuance rise to $307 billionin the first quarter of 2024—more than quadrupling the $72 billion issued in Q1 of 2023—the technology powering those workflows is minimal compared to other markets, as fax and email have remained king in relaying important information.
But those dark days look to be coming to an end.
This summer, in a testament to the industry’s efforts to move loan markets in a more digital direction, JP Morgan announced it had achieved straight-through processing using Versana’s loan data platform. STP is not new, and is already commonplace operationally for mature asset classes like securities and bonds, but other asset classes, such as loans, are playing a game of catch up.
Cynthia Sachs, Versana’s founding chief executive officer, describes achieving STP as the initial foundational end goal to attract lenders and administration agents to join the platform. “We want to come up with the times and be in 2024, use technology, and digitally do similar processes and take a lot of the manual work out, which other asset classes have done,” she says. “Now that that’s done, we can build upon it.”
