That’s right… We said TRILLION. Not one but two…
Syndicated Loans are complex for all parties involved and anyone in the field knows how slow productivity is during this drawn out loan process. Syndicated Loans Direct, which aspires to make this whole process that much easier is your answer to this nuisance. As a 2 year-old company, they are being taken in by Barclays’ Accelerator Program in NYC, which is focusing on providing fintech companies with new and exciting opportunities. We get into all the nitty-gritty details of Syndicated Loans with Shaheen Malik, as she solves the problems of the often complicated and slow process associated with syndicated loans.
Tell us about the decision to apply for Barclays Accelerator.
We have a research and analytics product offering in the syndicated loan space. We discovered that it was not easy to find investors or entrepreneur mentors at the intersection of finance, technology and deep sell-side banking experience. We were delighted to find the Barclays Techstars program, which had industry leading investors and entrepreneurs. The accelerator includes the best of both worlds, the cohesive Techstars community and the incredibly strong commitment from a top tier bank like Barclays to support each team. We believe this is easily one of the top Fintech accelerators anywhere in the world.
Tell us about your product or service.
We provide syndicated loan transaction analysis on a fast and flexible platform, showing users underlying risk in a deal.
How is it different?
Our platform creates a common language in the syndicated loan market. Loan deals are highly customized and take a long time to analyze. Our platform converts this information into underlying financial risk so that any user of the platform, a banker, a corporate lawyer, or an asset manager that is new to the asset class, can all understand the underlying risk in a deal quickly.
What market are you attacking and how big is it?
We service the syndicated loan market, which is over $2 trillion in annual deal issuance.
What inspired you to start the company?
Shaheen worked in the syndicated loan market for almost a decade and saw first hand the loss of productivity and information asymmetry due to lack of clean transaction data in the industry. She knew the data closely and decided to build a startup to fulfill this need of the industry.
What are the milestones that you plan to achieve within six months?
We plan to build out our full product platform, bring on board a few customers that are currently running a trial of our product and build out our methodology to scale our analytics.
What is the one piece of business advice that you never got?
Never run out of money, everything else is secondary in a startup.
If you could be put in touch with one investor in the New York community who would it be and why?
Henry Kravis because of his incredible experience building a large business and commitment towards the fintech community in NYC .
