In the end, everything comes down to the documents. More than anything else, it is the millions of pages that detail how transactions should take place and what information the parties to a trade should be aware of that are the lifeblood of the primary debt capital markets.
Trawling through all that can be a dull job, but until fairly recently someone – or many thousands of people, usually lawyers – had to do it. Increasingly, though, that is not the case. For some of those working in the developing ecosystem of companies that are trying to find neat ways to modernize the business of bringing borrowers and lenders together, documentation has been the vital starting point of their endeavours.
NowCM, a key player in that ecosystem, knows more about this than many. Chief executive Robert Koller first automated a prospectus for a debt issuance programme about 11 years ago when he was still a capital markets lawyer at Simmons & Simmons. The servers he was using back then hadn’t been tested like that before and promptly crashed when the system went live.
If
