Syndicated loan

A syndicated loan is one that is provided by a group of lenders and is structured, arranged, and administered by one or several commercial banks or investment banks known as lead arrangers.Transfer provisions in syndicated loan agreement set up procedures under which all the parties to the loan agreement agree that if a lender and a transferee (i) agree upon a transfer of all or part of the lender’s interest (ii) record the agreement but not the price or other ancillary matters which are to be dealt with separately and (iii) deliver this to the agent bank, the transfer will take effect. The effect of the transfer is that the transferee becomes a party to the agreement with rights and obligations which are the same - the identity of the parties expected - as those the ‘transferor’ had before the transfer. can be structured to give the borrower total or partial control over the type or identity of specific transferees or classes A syndicated loan is one that is provided by a group of lenders and is structured, arranged, and administered by one or several commercial banks or investment banks known as lead arrangers. The syndicated loan market is the dominant way for corporations in the U.S. and Europe to receive loans from banks and other institutional financial capital providers. Financial law often regulates the industry. The U.S. market originated with the large leveraged buyout loans of the mid-1980s,:23 and Europe's market blossomed with the launch of the euro in 1999. At the most basic level, arrangers serve the investment-banking role of raising investor funding for an issuer in need of capital. The issuer pays the arranger a fee for this service, and this fee increases with the complexity and risk factors of the loan. As a result, the most profitable loans are those to leveraged borrowers—issuers whose credit ratings are speculative grade and who are paying spreads (premiums or margins above the relevant LIBOR in the U.S. and UK, Euribor in Europe or another base rate) sufficient to attract the interest of non-bank term loan investors. Though, this threshold moves up and down depending on market conditions. In the U.S., corporate borrowers and private equity sponsors fairly even-handedly drive debt issuance. Europe, however, has far less corporate activity and its issuance is dominated by private equity sponsors, who, in turn, determine many of the standards and practices of loan syndication.:36 The retail market for a syndicated loan consists of banks and in the case of leveraged transactions, finance companies and institutional investors. The balance of power among these different investor groups is different in the U.S. than in Europe. The U.S. has a capital market where pricing is linked to credit quality and institutional investor appetite. In Europe, although institutional investors have increased their market presence over the past decade, banks remain a key part of the market. Consequently, pricing is not fully driven by capital market forces. In the U.S., market flex language drives initial pricing levels. Before formally launching a loan to these retail accounts, arrangers will often get a market read by informally polling select investors to gauge their appetite for the credit. After this market read, the arrangers will launch the deal at a spread and fee that it thinks will clear the market. Once the pricing, or the initial spread over a base rate (usually LIBOR), was set, it was largely fixed, except in the most extreme cases. If the loans were undersubscribed, the arrangers could very well be left above their desired hold level. Since the 1998 Russian financial crisis roiled the market, however, arrangers have adopted market-flex contractual language, which allows them to change the pricing of the loan based on investor demand—in some cases within a predetermined range—and to shift amounts between various tranches of a loan. This is now a standard feature of syndicated loan commitment letters. As a result of market flex, loan syndication functions as a book-building exercise, in bond-market parlance. A loan is originally launched to market at a target spread or, as was increasingly common by 2008 with a range of spreads referred to as price talk (i.e., a target spread of, say, LIBOR+250 to LIBOR+275). Investors then will make commitments that in many cases are tiered by the spread. For example, an account may put in for $25 million at LIBOR+275 or $15 million at LIBOR+250. At the end of the process, the arranger will total up the commitments and then make a call on where to price the paper. Following the example above, if the paper is vastly oversubscribed at LIBOR+250, the arranger may slice the spread further. Conversely, if it is undersubscribed even at LIBOR+275, then the arranger will be forced to raise the spread to bring more money to the table. In Europe, banks have historically dominated the debt markets because of the intrinsically regional nature of the arena. Regional banks have traditionally funded local and regional enterprises because they are familiar with regional issuers and can fund the local currency. Since the Eurozone was formed in 1998, the growth of the European leveraged loan market has been fuelled by the efficiency provided by this single currency as well as an overall growth in merger & acquisition (M&A) activity, particularly leveraged buyouts due to private equity activity. Regional barriers (and sensitivities toward consolidation across borders) have fallen, economies have grown and the euro has helped to bridge currency gaps.