Technology in Lending—Progress Through Common Standards

Lending could be revolutionized by technology, but there are still significant hurdles to overcome. These include adoption, standardization and the bespoke nature of loan documentation. A panel of industry experts—including Eusebio Echevarria, Chief Innovation Officer, Business Services at Kroll—discussed these issues at the Loan Market Association’s 2024 annual conference.

The panel began with two polls. The first asked what technology the audience saw impacting EMEA loan markets the most in 2025. Automation of process flow came in at the top, at 59%, followed by AI, large language models and machine learning at 34%.

The second poll asked the audience about their expectations for secondary settlement times in 2025. Almost half (46%) thought they would remain broadly the same, 42% expected them to be reduced by up to 10%, 8% anticipated times materially reducing by over 20% and 4% believed they would increase.

Emma Lovett, Executive Director at JPMorgan and the chair of the panel, said that everything in the loan market was highly bespoke and that the first step was to address that issue.

Vandhana Srinivas, Chief Information Officer for Wholesale Lending at Barclays, highlighted the lack of straight-through processing as a key issue in loans, in contrast to the situation with bonds. She added that other barriers to the efficient processing of loans included the idiosyncratic nature of loan documentation, the lack of a central clearinghouse and a fragmented data environment.

David Ratnage, Head of Commercial Lending Vertical EMEA at FIS, argued that while automation, particularly through AI and machine learning, is beginning to remedy the situation, the real challenge lies in overcoming institutional inertia and what he described as nostalgia relating to documentation.

The lending market, characterized by manual processes and legacy systems, has been slow to embrace change, despite the clear advantages technology offers. Ratnage noted that the rates of straight-through processing varied widely with banks and standard application programming interfaces would help to connect origination to the back office. He felt colleagues in Operations had been overlooked for years by their front-office counterparts, adding that his firm was using AI to identify threats to balance sheets with clients and to turn those threats into opportunities and triggers to change behavior.

Kroll’s Eusebio Echevarria underlined this point, saying that cultural barriers and the challenge of integrating old and new technologies have hindered technological improvements that proofs of concept have shown to be feasible. As he noted, “People are chasing PDFs and making calls to get the data from 9 to 5 rather than logging in to a system.” He added that it was important for agents to work with banks to agree to standards and that his firm had thrived partly due to frustration about the lack of technological progress. Echevarria noted that often human teams solved problems, which represented good customer service but led to those teams doing repetitive work.

The panelists agreed that a collaborative approach was needed to develop common standards for data taxonomy and documentation and ensure that those standards are widely adopted.

They also discussed how generational change and increased churn in financial institutions will drive change. Younger colleagues will have higher expectations regarding technology, and firms have fewer long-serving staff able to guide less-experienced colleagues on how to use technology.

Kroll’s Agency and Trustee Services practice, a leading provider in the global loan and bond markets, was proud to sponsor LMA’s 2024 Loan Markets Conference. Kroll has positioned itself as a pivotal player in addressing industry challenges by leveraging its expertise in innovation and technology integration. Eusebio Echevarria emphasized that Kroll’s success stems from a proactive approach to tackling inefficiencies in the lending market. By identifying pain points in traditional processes and demonstrating the feasibility of technological solutions through proofs of concept, Kroll has driven meaningful change.

Kroll’s commitment to fostering collaboration between agents and banks to establish and agree on standards is a testament to its strategic vision. As the financial landscape continues to evolve, Kroll will continue to champion standardization and technological adoption to help usher in a new era of streamlined, automated processes that could revolutionize the loan market.

Learn more about Kroll’s Agency and Trustee Services or contact one of our experts.