Challenge  

A leading North American bank’s Capital Markets team faced mounting pressure in its Leveraged Finance (LevFin) business due to extensive trade settlement times, ~ 33% slower than industry average. With the expectation for the LevFin business to grow, addressing scalability concerns became a priority. CRG was engaged to drive a diagnostic of the end-to-end process from deal origination, syndication, settlement, and to secondary trading. The engagement aimed at isolating root causes, elevating team insight, and designing future-ready, scalable operations. 

Approach  

The project was executed in three phases: Diagnose, Assess, and Recommend. 
 

Diagnose: 

• Interviewed 45+ stakeholders across multinational teams to map the deal lifecycle across five stages: Origination, Primary Syndication, Loan Settlement and Servicing, Reporting and Tracking, and Secondary Trading 
• Shadowed front-, middle-, and back-office teams for system walkthroughs to understand pain points and sources of delay 
• Created a high-fidelity timeline dissection of a deal and a trade to highlight handoffs, rework, and inefficiencies 

Assess: 

• Assessed technology gaps and data flow across 17+ systems, highlighting data mismatches and reconciliation failures across systems 
• Conducted root cause analysis to understand and consolidate source of pain points and inefficiencies 

Recommend: 

• Developed 50 recommendations across primary deals and secondary trading, targeting speed and scalability 
• Prioritized recommendations by ease/impact and tagged to accountable owners with a detailed implementation roadmap 
• Defined a future state operating model emphasizing front- to back-office coordination, upstream data capture, and system integration 

Outcome

 CRG’s engagement delivered a comprehensive process transformation roadmap across people, process, and technology. With it, the client is positioned to: 

• Reduce time to settlement through better coordination and reduced manual intervention 
• Improve downstream data accuracy through upstream system integration 
• Scale the LevFin business more efficiently, with clear owner alignment across the end-to-end process