Global Debt Registry (GDR) announced on Wednesday (June 27) the launch of its loan registry, created to verify and provide transparency for loan data on the cloud-based IBM Blockchain Platform. In a press release, GDR said that all loan-level collateral positions and verification activity will now be recorded on the decentralized registry with secure permissioning and access controls. That, said Global Debt Registry, will provide new levels of efficiency to the $400 billion asset-backed securities (ABS) market.
“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,” said Charlie Moore, president of Global Debt Registry. “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.”
According to GDR, the ABS market relies on a large ecosystem of service providers across a siloed supply chain that starts with the loan origination. The process has a lot of repetitive tasks, which results in slow transactions, errors and information that can be inconsistent. GDR said its decentralized registry has more than 700,000 loans registered to date across multiple credit facilities with the main focus on digital lending. Global Debt Registry said that several investment banks and online lenders, such as Avant, are using it.
Kevin Friedrich, VP finance & treasury from Avant, said in the press release, “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.”
Meanwhile, Marie Wieck, general manager of IBM Blockchain, said “one of the strongest uses of blockchain that IBM has seen” work with hundreds of clients is tracing the origin of financial assets.