By John Hintze
See below for excerpts from a recent GARP article. Read the full article here.
While waves of technological innovation swept through one capital-market segment after another over the last quarter century, trading of syndicated loans remained mired in manual inefficiencies and plagued by weeks-long settlement cycles. Modernization initiatives launched in 2022 by bank-led joint ventures Octaura and Versana are now shifting this $1.39 trillion market into high gear.
While Octaura was focused on the front end, Versana set its sights on data transparency as “the market’s first real-time, multi-tenant solution centralizing corporate loan data flowing directly from administrative agents’ books and records,” the company said in March 2023 when announcing that Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley, U.S. Bancorp and Wells Fargo had joined founding investors BofA, Citi and JPMorgan in a $40 million funding round.
“With the global capital markets in a fairly volatile state at the moment, now is the time to ensure that agent banks, lenders, fund administrators and trustees all have the needed transparency and digital tools to manage and drive the syndicated loan market forward,” Versana founding CEO Cynthia Sachs said in a blog at the time.
