RIVA Markets — Bridging the Gap Between Borrowers and Investors in the Digital Age
In the evolving landscape of the financial world, Real-World-Asset (RWA) tokenisation has become a buzzword heralding a new era of efficiency and transparency. Taking on this transformation is RIVA Markets, a platform that goes beyond the typical promises of digital finance. By building a comprehensive infrastructure for loan origination, securitisation and tokenisation and a marketplace with deal matching for primary issuance and secondary market trading, RIVA Markets is setting itself apart in the financial market and blockchain arena. What truly elevates RIVA Markets to a unique pedestal is by leveraging the blockchain to originate real estate and private debt natively on-chain for full transparency and provide a marketplace serving both sides in the most efficient way to reduce complexity, efforts and costs sourcing funding for borrowers and sourcing and facilitating investments on the investors side.
A Holistic Ecosystem for Financial Growth
RIVA Markets isn’t just another platform in the vast sea of blockchain innovations; it’s a holistic ecosystem designed to serve both, borrowers and investors in the most efficient way.
By directly originating loans on-chain, RIVA Markets ensures a seamless, swift, and secure transaction process. This direct origination provide many benefits as the data is directly recorded on-chain right from the beginning and along the whole lifecycle of the loan for full transparency. This is especially beneficial for the further securitisation and tokenisation for a seamless primary market issuance and efficient secondary market transactions.
The Gap between Professional Borrowers and Lenders
Real estate developers and lenders as well as SME’s, where used to be served by the traditional banks for their debt capital needs over decades. Those companies are mostly very local organised, with their local banks serving those financing needs. But due to the increasing regulatory burdens for the banks and increased requirements for the borrowers, those are left with a funding gap, forced to search for alternative lending sources, which is hard to identify and approach efficiently. This is true for the initial funding, but also and especially for refinancing in more challenging times as we’re right now. A recent study by CBRE has estimated a funding gap in Europe alone of €176 Billion between 20224 to 2027, which will and is already forcing borrowers to either offset their assets with a loss or even go bankrupt. The main reason for bankruptcy of real estate investors is their inability to secure refinancing in times when credit markets gets tough.
With the increased interest rates, this market has become highly attractive (again) for alternative lenders and investors such as private and real estate debt funds, asset manager, insurance, family offices or even banks asset management division and own specialised fund structures from other more global oriented banks. And even for more difficult situations or distressed loans, there are specific investors seeking for deals. But those investors often lacking efficient access to preferred deals. The result is a huge effort, loss of time and high costs on both sides, and therewith lost opportunities.
And this is where RIVA Markets provides the solution for both ends in the most efficient and innovative way.
Driving Demand on Both Ends
The genius of RIVA Markets lies in its dual approach. On one hand, it empowers borrowers by offering a streamlined, transparent, and efficient platform to secure loans. This not only speeds up the loan acquisition process, but also ensures that borrowers are privy to every detail, fostering trust and transparency.
On the other hand for investors, RIVA Markets provides an avenue to source deals more efficiently with a clear understanding of their investments negotiate the terms directly on RIVA Markets and conduct the closing fully digital. The platform’s infrastructure facilitates the transaction as primary issuance and on our secondary market, making it easier for investors to diversify their portfolios, manage risks, and gain access to a broader range of investment opportunities.
This dual approach ensures a perpetual demand cycle. As more borrowers leverage the platform for their financial needs, it attracts more investors looking for solid, transparent investment opportunities. And as more investors offer their capital on the platform, it becomes even more attractive for potential borrowers. This symbiotic relationship between borrowers and lenders is the cornerstone of RIVA Markets’ approach.
RIVA Markets sees its role as pure facilitator, but we’ve developed our system that it significantly supports the investor in the due diligence and underwriting of the loan by an integrated data room, an own AI due diligence tool extracting and preparing the data and information in a well-structured way, and providing a digital closing process by automated terms sheet and even loan contract generation, and upload of own documents with digital signing. Additionally, RIVA Markets integrates with Moody’s Analytics for advanced risk assessment and management.
RIVA Markets’ Hybrid Approach for a seamless Transition to Tokenised Asset Management
Although there is a lot of hype and development around the topic of tokenised securities, the reality is that many traditional investors are or ready yet to fully embrace the benefits of tokenised investments. This has to do with the lack of knowledge about the true benefits and potentials compared to traditional investments, but also the regulatory uncertainty and the technical challenges for those investors, who are mostly not tech savvy as their business is very traditional minded creating yields on their investment strategies.
RIVA Markets’ goal is to provide those investors a novel marketplace for their investment strategies, and at the same time an efficient infrastructure to improve their operations processes, reduce costs and provide them a future opportunity to make their assets liquid. In order to do so without creating hurdles, we’ve chosen a unique approach leveraging the blockchain for loan origination on-chain, but provide the opportunity for traditional bilateral, but digital loan agreements and settlements, the option to create digital securities with its own ISIN or CUSIP and the settlement through depository accounts, and the option to create a security token of these assets for the future potential to trade those assets on our or other security token marketplaces. We’ve chosen this approach also because we believe that for several types of loans and investors this is an unnecessary step, such as for short-term bridge loans or construction loans, which the investor anyway wants to hold until maturity. But even for the case that an investor/ lender is forced to sell a loan, we can also securitise and tokenise the loan during the lifecycle of the loan to trade the loan and get back the investment if really needed. This can even be used in the case of a non-performing loan that can then be more easily traded to specialised NPL investors.
In the complex world of finance, RIVA Markets emerges as a beacon of simplicity, transparency, and efficiency. By not only providing an infrastructure for the tokenisation of assets and trading of security tokens, but also by originating loans directly on-chain, it creates a balanced ecosystem where both borrowers and investor thrive. As the digital age advances, RIVA Markets is paving the way for a more integrated, transparent, and efficient financial future.
Join us as we usher in a new era in the world of finance, built on transparency, efficiency, and liquidity for the global real estate and private debt market.
