At the beginning of September this year a significant landmark was achieved by our customers, and a landmark for the loan market generally. Following many years of collaboration and hard work, our ADFlow solution became mandatory for all trading legal entities utilizing the ClearPar settlement platform, and in turn marked the culmination of a project to fully standardize and digitize Administrative Detail Forms (ADFs) across the global loan market.
Leveraging the LMA and LSTA industry standard ADF template, ADFlow offers a digitized solution and workflow for institutions to manage their entity data on a fully audited, online portal. For those involved in loan operations, you will know historically these documents were manually created, unformatted and non-standardized, and shared often over email. ClearPar automated the access and sharing of these documents almost two decades ago, and now ADFlow completes the journey to full digitization and security.
Directly integrated with ClearPar, updates made on ADFlow ensures real-time updates on open trades with parties accurate, verified standard settlement instructions (SSIs). Given that all changes are securely processed and approved on the portal, institutions create stringent internal controls, ensuring the highest degree of data integrity and removing the need to send sensitive documents or data via less secure methods such as email. In addition to added security for internal ADFs, institutions can view ADFs of counterparties, assured the data is current given re-verification requirements and transparency. This has resulted in many of the largest dealers and agents eliminating callbacks to verify correct SSIs before remitting payments.
We would like to thank all our customers globally who have worked with us in close collaboration to bring ADFlow to this point, with now over 17,000 trading entities and over 28,000 unique currency SSIs managed digitally within the platform. The user experience will continue to evolve to ensure ADFlow meets the demands of the changing regulatory environment in the years to come.
For many, focus turns to automating the consumption of ADF and SSI data into downstream systems through ADFlow messaging capabilities. The consumption of ADFlow data directly into source systems removes the rekeying of such sensitive data and can be used to facilitate payment automation without any need for human intervention. Something a number of custodians and trustees have been leveraging for a number of years.
ClearPar’s enhanced user experience
As the market continues to grow both in terms of trade volume and market participants, ensuring ClearPar evolves to support further efficiency and industry demands is of upmost importance. But also to offer users a refreshed and customized experience.
Live since 2021, the new ClearPar user interface represents a re-imagined settlement workflow experience whereby users are afforded more flexibility in terms of how they manage their trades and complete tasks. Moving away from the concept of fixed workflows via 'workbins’, users now access and complete all actions directly from a single consolidated trade list view. Every task or ‘exception’ is one click away and can be quickly identified based on customized search criteria and saved filters. And continuing the theme of interoperability between our solutions, the new interface is integrated with Loan Reconciliation, Notice Manager, and Loan Reference Data. Users can access golden source agent position data across 17,000 loan facilities (9 trillion notional), agent notices and credit agreement loan reference data embedded within each trade. The Agent position data is now even used to help automate decision making within trades for consent and position availability.
As we focus our development efforts and build new revolutionary functionality and integrations in our consolidated Loan Platforms site, the legacy ClearPar user interface will be sunset in early 2025. For the 400+ institutions, and thousands of users, already utilizing and familiar with the new ClearPar this has very little impact on them. For those not yet migrated or using the new experience fully, that time has come. To prepare for this transition, we will be hosting a series of training webinars over the coming months and circulating further detailed information and FAQ’s to ensure your teams are ready. And in addition to already delivered functionality developments the new ClearPar already offers, users can expect to see new borrower consent request workflows, support of disqualified lender lists for agents, and new features to support master participation settlement in the final part of 2024.
If the ADFlow adoption project was a landmark event, this could be viewed as another key moment for the settlement space given ClearPar’s journey over the last two decades. If your institution is not yet utilizing the new ClearPar interface, please contact our onboarding team to discuss.
The Loan Platforms team will also be at both the LMA and LSTA annual conferences in September. We look forward to seeing many familiar faces and discussing some of these topics with you there.