A Singapore-headquartered consumer lender originating across multiple emerging markets, with an Indian NBFC subsidiary as its largest book. Originations were strong and the book performed. The constraint was capital: growing the loan book meant institutional debt, and the group's existing funding was neither large enough nor structured for the next stage.
The raise had to work as two different transactions at once. A USD senior tranche at the Singapore holding company answers to one set of lenders and one set of documents. A local-currency and external commercial borrowing tranche at the India NBFC answers to a completely different regulatory perimeter, a different lender universe, and different pricing logic.
Partway into the process, a domestic rating agency placed the Indian entity on an Issuer Not Cooperating designation. For a credit process, this is close to the worst timing possible: it is a public signal that reads as a governance flag whether or not the underlying credit has changed, and it lands in every lender's first screen.
Running a clean process around that flag — explaining it before it was discovered, evidencing what it did and didn't mean, and keeping momentum while it was resolved — became a core part of the mandate rather than an aside.
A lender universe mapped by mandate fit rather than by size: which funds have SEA consumer credit appetite, which have India ECB capability, which will take holdco senior and which need asset-level security.
A negative-list protocol run jointly with the borrower's India CFO, so no lender was approached who was already in dialogue or off-limits.
The full diligence pack: loan tape, cohort and vintage performance, loss curves, underwriting policy documentation, and portfolio analytics structured the way credit committees test them.
DDQ management across simultaneous, non-identical processes — every fund asks a different set of questions and expects a different format.
A live pipeline tracker maintained as the single source of truth between Zenith and the borrower, updated on a fixed weekly cadence.
More than fifty funds engaged across the process, with roughly twenty in active dialogue at any point. Live NDAs, submitted DDQs, and structuring conversations with international banks, specialist private credit funds, and special situations desks. The mandate is in market.
A cross-border lending group is not one credit. It's several, stacked, and the placement strategy has to be built entity by entity — not run as a single process with a single deck.
Last reviewed August 2026
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Tell us the transaction and the timetable. If it is not something we should run, we will say so.