Putative online bank loan trading platform LoanQuorum has cut a deal to provide users with Standard & Poor's ratings and financial analysis data.
Under the agreement, LoanQuorum will incorporate S&P's proprietary bank loan and corporate credit ratings information into its trading system alongside selected global sector review reports.
"The loan market has increasingly relied on ratings to provide critical standards to measure borrower, credit and counterparty risk," says Hernan Narea, chief executive officer of LoanQuorum and a former senior managing director at US moneycentre bank Chase. "Standard & Poor's rates the syndicated loans of over 1200 corporations totaling almost $900 billion. This agreement allows LoanQuorum not only to make this raw data available to registered users, but also to actually integrate it into the analytic and administrative functions we developed, to enable financial institutions to automatically access and filter borrowers and trading counterparties according to their risk preferences."
LoanQuorum and Standard & Poor's also will share aggregated secondary loan transaction data, which will be used to more closely correlate the linkage between secondary loan market supply and demand and resultant pricing and liquidity, and the ratings analysis process.
LoanQuorum's trading system was developed by a number of senior banking professionals including former bankers from Chase, JP Morgan and UBS Warburg. The system is designed to enable members to access loan information, perform credit analytics, post and access supporting loan documentation, systematically screen trading counterparties and buy and sell loans in a secure and confidential environment.
According to Narea, the LoanQuorum live platform is fully developed and operational and a closed version of the system currently is being piloted by several institutional users.