Lending and fintech businesses raise debt against a loan book rather than a balance sheet, which makes the loan tape — not the pitch — the thing that gets underwritten. Zenith structures and places warehouse, onward-lending and corporate facilities for originators from first institutional facility through programmatic debt, and runs the borrowing-base and covenant reporting those facilities require.
A holding company in Singapore and an operating NBFC in India are not one borrower with two addresses. The holdco tranche is a USD senior facility answering to international credit funds, documented under English or Singapore law, secured on share pledges and intercompany loans. The India tranche is a local-currency or external commercial borrowing facility answering to a different regulatory perimeter, a different lender universe, and pricing logic that has almost nothing to do with the first.
Run as a single process with a single deck, both fail. The international funds see a structure they can't take security over; the domestic lenders see a group story that doesn't address the entity they're actually lending to. The placement has to be built entity by entity, with a separate lender universe, a separate diligence pack, and a separate negotiation for each.
Not the growth story. The loan tape — every loan, every field, every month. Cohort and vintage performance, so the committee can see whether recent originations behave like older ones. Loss curves that flatten where they should. Roll rates between delinquency buckets. Underwriting policy documentation that matches what the tape shows actually happened.
And underneath all of it, one question: can the reporting behind these numbers be trusted month after month? A borrower who can produce a clean tape once has demonstrated a report. A borrower who produces one every month for a year has demonstrated a system.
Most lenders arrive at their first institutional facility with a finance function built for statutory reporting — annual accounts, tax, audit. A facility commits them to something else entirely: a borrowing base recalculated monthly against eligibility criteria and advance rates, covenant certificates on a fixed schedule, and portfolio reporting a credit committee will actually read.
The gap between the two is invisible until the first missed certificate, at which point it stops being an internal problem and becomes a lender conversation. Building the facility reporting function before the facility closes is materially cheaper than explaining a breach afterwards.
Every clean monthly report is diligence for the next raise, done in advance. A borrower with twelve months of on-time borrowing-base certificates and covenant compliance walks into an upsize conversation with an evidenced track record; a borrower without one starts from scratch, at a worse price, with a longer process.
This is the cheapest pricing leverage available to a lending business and it is almost entirely operational rather than financial.
Warehouse and onward-lending facilities placed against a performing book. The work is the loan tape, the cohort curves and the borrowing base — the deck is the last thing a credit committee reads.
Where a bank warehouse will not clear the credit box, a fund will — at a price. We structure the instrument, test the downside case, and take it to the desks that underwrite originators.
A facility finance function, not a statutory one: borrowing-base certificates, covenant testing before the lender tests it, and monthly reporting on the facility's schedule rather than the audit's.
Quality of earnings on a lending book means the loan tape, the provisioning policy and the vintage curves. Buyers price what they cannot verify, so verification comes first.
Equity and debt investors read the same cohort data. Building it once, properly, is what lets a company run both processes without contradicting itself.
USD 100,000,000
A two-tranche club facility for a multi-market emerging-markets lender
USD senior tranche at the Singapore holdco · local-currency and ECB tranche at the India NBFC subsidiary
Running the reporting a credit facility actually commits you to
Borrowing-base calculation, covenant compliance testing, and monthly lender reporting operated as an ongoing service
Facilities for platforms lending against trade documents, not balance sheets
Debt placement mandates for trade finance and commodity receivables platforms — facility structuring and lender engagement
Facility size is set by the loan tape, not the pitch. Lenders size against demonstrated origination volume, vintage performance and loss curves, not projected growth. A first institutional facility is typically sized conservatively against a defined eligible pool with advance rates and eligibility criteria; upsizes follow once twelve months of clean borrowing-base and covenant reporting exist. Cross-border groups need this exercise repeated entity by entity.
Every loan, every field, every month. Cohort and vintage performance showing whether recent originations behave like older ones, loss curves that flatten as expected, roll rates between delinquency buckets, and underwriting policy documentation consistent with what the tape actually shows happened. Beyond the numbers, the credit committee is testing whether the reporting can be trusted repeatedly, not just once.
It depends on whether the facility reporting function already exists. A borrower with clean, monthly, audit-ready loan-tape reporting can move through diligence quickly because the credit committee's core questions are already answered in the data. A borrower building that reporting capability during the process, rather than before it, should expect the timeline to extend materially, since gaps in the tape become negotiation points rather than closed items.
Yes, but the loan tape has to do the work a rating would otherwise do. Institutional credit funds will underwrite an unrated originator on the strength of vintage performance, cohort data and a demonstrated reporting system, provided the borrowing-base mechanics and covenant reporting are built to institutional standard before the facility closes. Absence of a rating raises the diligence bar; it does not close the market.
It shifts the conversation from the growth story to the tape. Lenders will want the flagged issue addressed with data — cohort or vintage evidence, underwriting policy documentation, and an explanation reconciled against what the loan tape actually shows. A flag is manageable if the reporting system behind it is credible; it becomes a structural problem only if the borrower cannot produce consistent monthly evidence to answer it.
A warehouse facility is a revolving debt line secured against a pool of originated loans, drawn as new loans are added and repaid as they amortise or are sold, with a borrowing base recalculated monthly. A forward flow agreement is a commitment by a buyer to purchase loans meeting agreed criteria as they are originated, transferring the asset rather than financing it on the originator's balance sheet.
Last reviewed August 2026
Tell us the transaction and the timetable. If it is not something we should run, we will say so.
