Transforming Debt Capital Markets — From Paper to Digital to Tokenised

Johannes Gugl
RIVA Markets
Published in
3 min readApr 11, 2024

Despite all the benefits of emerging innovations and technologies, with fintech disruptors and now AI, the lending business has shown a strong resistance to utilising technology for the better. And even worse, it hasn’t even really learned from the global financial crisis. Especially as banks are increasingly retreating due to tigher risk capital requirements and private debt filling this gap, those alternative lenders often even lack the basic technology for efficient loan origination and management that banks have had in place for decades.

Documents are shared via e-mail or Dropbox, due diligence and underwriting processes are completely manual and paper-based loan agreements and legal contracts are mostly prepared, signed, and exchanged physically. The manual nature of these processes result in complete data silos with often inconsistent data and an inability to track and manage those loans efficiently, as well as high costs for all parties involved.

Transforming Debt Capital Markets with RIVA Markets

RIVA Markets emerges as a visionary force, dismantling these barriers through digital transformation. Our end-to-end solution digitises every step of the debt financing process from origination over secondary market trading to closing.

Especially the utilisation of the blockchain technology and AI provides the lending and the debt capital market the technical infrastructure to truly revolutionise the way loans are originated, funded, tracked and managed. The blockchain has several roles here as it acts as the immutable database, housing the whole data stream along the loan lifecycle creating full transparency, as well as defining the hard coded rules reflecting terms and rule-based executions such as automated service functions or the waterfall structure in case of a defaulting loan.

Our end-to-end solution digitises every step of the debt financing process from origination over secondary market trading to closing.

The Way to Tokenised Asset Management — but with a Pinch of Salt

Another major role of blockchain technology is the tokenisation of assets. This is generally seen as the future of asset management as it proposes great benefits, mostly related to increased liquidity.

As a market innovator we believe in the potential of tokenised assets, but we also take that with a pinch of salt, as the reality is that the broader financial industry is slow in adopting. Time and resources to properly evaluate the potentials and how to make use of it, along with risk management considerations and regulatory implications are holding such developments back. As initially described, the industry is not even digital yet.

As a market innovator we believe in the potential of tokenised assets, but we also take that with a pinch of salt, as the reality is that the broader financial industry is slow in adopting.

Transition to highest Efficiency

At RIVA Markets we’re fully aware of those issues, and we have developed our solution to support private debt investors in the transition from manual and paper-based operations to a digital workflow and ultimately to tokenised asset management. Our infrastructure offers the opportunity to originate loans on-chain with a digital loan agreement, to seamlessly issue innovative asset-backed securities pools or as single loan tranche, and the full tokenised investment product.

Step-by-step we support the capital market in the transition to highest efficiency.

Want to learn more about our solution and transition approach? We’d be happy to hear from you.

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Johannes Gugl
RIVA Markets

Innovation-driven entrepreneur building solutions that make sense - I write about #RIVAMarkets - #CROPR and other things I find interesting to share