Private credit assets under management have expanded significantly, reaching an estimated $2 trillion globally by the end of 2024, with projections suggesting continued expansion to $3 trillion by 2028. As the demand for private credit continues to experience rapid growth and evolve in market use, the operational and legal stakes for firms have never been higher.
Historically, private market firms have relied on ad hoc processes and inefficient, manual systems, such as email, calendars, and spreadsheets, to manage their credit agreements and obligation compliance operations. For funds, deal teams, and compliance professionals, manually reviewing documents and tracking deliverables poses real risks: missed lender obligations, reactive negotiations, and inefficient processes that slow key business decisions.
Recognizing these mounting challenges, Ontra is excited to announce the launch of Insight for Credit, a purpose-built, AI-powered solution designed to help private market firms transform how they manage, understand, and deliver on credit commitments.
Solving today’s credit agreement challenges
Private markets firms face several pain points with surfacing and comparing buried terms within precedent agreements and managing obligation compliance:
- Lack of historical context: Deal teams and back office professionals often lack easy access to previously negotiated terms, leaving them unprepared for new financing discussions. Without the ability to benchmark, firms risk agreeing to less favorable conditions or creating costly inconsistencies.
- Manual compliance burden: Finance, legal, and compliance teams must proactively satisfy complex covenants across multiple agreements. Existing workflows—spread across spreadsheets, emails, or horizontal software—are time-consuming, error-prone, and siloed.
- Reactive risk management: Without a centralized repository with built-in checks, teams are forced into reactive compliance, increasing exposure to defaults, penalties, and reputational damage.
- Siloed information: Without a single source of truth, teams are forced to track down the latest version of agreements (hopefully including the most recent amendments), request term summaries from external counsel, or allocate team resources just to collect and manage previously negotiated terms.
The solution: Insight for Credit
Insight for Credit is an AI-powered credit solution purpose-built for private markets firms. It enables business leaders with the right information to optimize decision-making by helping firms easily understand and compare credit agreements, track upcoming deliverables, and satisfy commitments to lenders — all in one place.
Key benefits of Insight for Credit:
- Save time: Quickly access and understand restrictions and requirements in your credit agreements.
- Stay competitive: Easily review and benchmark against terms from past agreements when negotiating new facilities.
- Manage risk: Confidently track debt covenants and satisfy commitments to lenders.
- Strengthen compliance: Proactively monitor compliance requirements and default triggers.
Enable proactive decision-making with structured, actionable data
Insight for Credit is designed to transform how private market firms manage and act on credit agreements, empowering teams to move from reactive, manual processes to proactive, data-driven workflows and decision-making. Here’s how:
AI-powered contract abstraction
- Digitization & categorization: Insight for Credit leverages AI to abstract credit agreements and automate identifying and categorizing covenants — including affirmative, financial, and negative covenants.
- Structured search & summaries: All agreements and key terms are turned into searchable, structured data. Teams can search for specific terms, compare clauses, and view summaries connected to the underlying document language so teams can easily surface details without lengthy document review.
Real-time term comparison & historical insights
- Automatic summaries: Insight summarizes and compares key legal and business terms, helping users spot trends, outliers, and inconsistencies instantly rather than spending hours in manual review.
- Benchmarking & term comparison: Deal teams and back office professionals gain one-click access to historical terms across new and past agreements. This enables quick benchmarking, streamlining negotiations, and ensuring no opportunity for better terms is missed because of information gaps.
Searchable digital repository
- Single source of truth: The consolidation of all credit agreements and underlying obligations in one digital, secure platform means decision-makers are always equipped with the full scope of relevant information. This removes siloed oversight and decentralization that traditionally delays decision-making.
- Precedent comprehension: With advanced search and SmartLine, legal teams can quickly surface information previously buried in agreements to redline differences against a selected base provision, across documents.
Task management for obligation tracking
- Proactive compliance: Finance, legal, and compliance teams can assign, monitor, and proactively deliver on all lender commitments — affirmative and financial covenants, as well as event-triggered defaults. Tasks and reminders replace manual methods, reducing the risk of missed obligations.
- Automated task creation: Insight automatically creates known obligation tasks and alerts users to upcoming compliance requirements, supporting ongoing adherence and strengthening lender relationships.
Streamlined workflows and competitive agility
- Reduced manual burden: Centralized information and automation eliminate time-consuming tasks, so teams spend less time searching for and within documents, and more time analyzing insights and making actionable decisions.
- Faster, better decisions: Accelerated access to actionable data ensures critical decisions — like negotiating terms, satisfying lender commitments, and approving asset-level actions — are made quickly, based on the best available evidence.
Get started today
Ready to streamline your compliance workflows and stay ahead of lender commitments? Book a custom demo and see how Ontra’s Insight for Credit can help your firm automate compliance and deliver on commitments.
