Financial Technology / Europe / 2017
Structuring a securitised instrument from trade receivables
A European FinTech held cashflows from trade receivables and no route to institutional capital. We designed the risk-scoring basis and asset structure that turned those cashflows into a fixed-income product.
Disciplines
- Structured finance
- Risk modelling
- Corporate structuring
Context
The firm’s SME clients needed working capital at competitive rates. Institutional investors wanted fixed-income exposure with a credible risk basis. The receivables sat between the two, and the obstacle to connecting them was not appetite but measurement: no scoring approach existed that institutions were prepared to underwrite.
Approach
We built the risk-scoring model from three inputs — counterparty analytics, market dynamics and historical performance — and treated its defensibility as a design requirement equal to its accuracy. An investor must be able to interrogate why a given receivable scored as it did, and a model that cannot answer that question cannot support an instrument regardless of how well it performs in backtest.
The asset structure was then designed around the scoring, rather than the scoring being fitted to a predetermined structure. We worked through the corporate and regulatory form alongside the firm’s counsel, since the instrument’s viability rested on both.
Outcome
The resulting structure gave SMEs access to working capital at competitive rates and gave institutional investors a new fixed-income product with a risk basis they could examine. The scoring model remains the firm’s own asset, extended by its team as the book has grown.