Percent unveils digital solution for private credit underwriters

By Edlyn Cardoza

Percent, the capital markets platform transforming the multi-trillion-dollar lending industry, recently announced the launch of Percent Underwriter, its digitally native solution designed to streamline the deal-making process for both sell-side and buy-side firms underwriting private credit transactions.

Percent’s underwriter solution brings the entire lifecycle of a private credit deal into one intuitive platform that delivers time-saving workflow automation, directly addressing a notoriously inefficient underwriting process. Financial firms on this crucial side of private credit transactions, which previously had no other alternative to manual deal-making, can now utilize Percent’s framework to source new clients efficiently, structure market standard offerings, choose to syndicate to a fast-growing investor base, and use Percent’s post-close reporting and servicing.

“Our underwriter offering was built by underwriters for underwriters,” said Prath Reddy, President of Percent. “Thanks to our evolving infrastructure, we are opening up an area of the market that until now has been uneconomical for underwriters to consider. The old saying, ‘The $1 billion deal takes just as much time and effort as the $1 million deal’ is simply no longer the case as we’ve been able to profitably execute on hundreds of ‘smaller’ private credit deals using this framework, which we are now making available to any qualified underwriter.”

Throttle Capital and All Ships Investors are among the initial wave of underwriters joining the platform in Q1.

“The Percent platform enables a replicable, systematic, and data-driven underwriting process coupled with cost-efficient legal documentation and near real-time key collateral performance monitoring to help scale deal origination and probability of closing,” said Rana Mookherjee, Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Throttle Capital. “Our partnership with Percent — and being able to find and engage in transactions across its platform — will be a key driver of growth for us in 2022 and beyond.”

Percent is poised for continued advancement in the rapidly evolving private credit space. The underwriting offering is the latest in a string of product releases aimed at empowering market participants on Percent. In late 2021, the company launched Sync to further accelerate the growth of the innovative FinTech lenders and financing companies on its platform. It also brought to market Percent Blended Notes, which offers investors exposure to multiple private credit investments from a single touchpoint and was created in response to robust investor demand.

“Before the launch of Percent, private credit – a massive $8 trillion market – was an especially opaque and disorganized field,” said Dick Parsons, former Chairman of Citigroup and former CEO and Chairman of Time Warner. “Percent is completely disrupting this area of the market as it continues to bring standardization to private credit transactions, much in the way Wall Street did when it developed mortgage-backed securities and high-yield bonds. And thanks to modern technologies and the talent and dedication of its team, Percent is doing it in a fraction of the time. I remain beyond impressed with the speed of their innovation and their ability to address the evolving needs of all market participants: investors, borrowers and now underwriters.” Dick Parsons and his business partner Ronald Lauder are investors in Percent through R&R Venture Partners.

Led by CEO and founder Nelson Chu, Percent has underwritten more than $700 million in transactions across more than 250 offerings since launching in 2019. As they advance, underwriters can now leverage Percent’s infrastructure platform and solutions, as well as benefit from the company’s innovative workflow tools and technology — all while engaging in an interoperable three-sided market powered by the startup.