Global Debt Registry (“GDR”) today announced the launch of its loan registry designed to verify and provide transparency on loan data on the cloud-based IBM Blockchain Platform.
All loan level collateral positions and verification activity will now be immutably recorded on the decentralized registry with highly secure permissioning and access controls to provide new levels of efficiency to the $400bn asset backed securities (ABS) market.
Currently, the ABS market is dependent on a large ecosystem of service providers across a long, siloed supply chain starting at loan origination. The process is riddled with repetitive tasks, opening participants up to slow transactions, errors and inconsistent information. GDR’s decentralized registry has more than 700,000 loans registered to date, across multiple credit facilities, primarily focused on digital lending.
Several investment banks are using this blockchain platform to manage collateral positions more effectively, across many originators including premier online lending platform, Avant.
“Avant is committed to serving its capital partners with innovative technical solutions to maximize transparency and ease of collateral management, as further demonstrated through our use of GDR’s blockchain based registry,” says Kevin Friedrich, VP Finance & Treasury from Avant, a leading online lending platform in the US.
Built and tested on the IBM Blockchain Platform Starter Plan, the decentralized loan registry enables permissioned parties to access trusted data across the loan lifecycle. By bringing this marketplace to a distributed ledger environment, not only can market processes be optimized by reducing the need for middlemen, but also a higher level of transparency can be shared among issuers and auditors.
“One of the strongest use cases of blockchain that IBM has seen in working with hundreds of clients is its ability to trace the origin of a variety of financial assets,” said Marie Wieck, General Manager, IBM Blockchain. “Global Debt Registry is a pioneer in the space of loan provenance and is using blockchain to reinvent the entire business model by providing all relevant parties a shared view of loan data. Ultimately, this will allow the market to preserve the integrity of these assets, proving the value of blockchain in streamlining manual, repetitive processes in these complex supply chains.”
President of Global Debt Registry, Charlie Moore said, “We selected the IBM Blockchain Platform due to IBM’s profound understanding of enterprise needs within the financial services industry and the ability to test our solution in a simulated environment. The tokenization of loans and supporting loan data represents a huge opportunity to bring efficiency and speed to the structured credit industry. Blockchain based loan records will not only enhance asset integrity, but enable cost savings, automation through smart contracts, faster deal execution and new structured credit products.”