A Blockchain in Concluding and Administering a Syndicated Loan Agreement

A traditional banking market has undergone significant changes caused by rapid development of digital technologies, which has been largely facilitated by the coronavirus pandemic. At the same time, it seems that a blockchain technology has gained great importance in the issuance of syndicated loans. This circumstance is explained by the fact that a syndicated loan agreement, similar to the blockchain technology, traditionally brings together a large number of participants, including, in particular, borrowers, lenders, a loan manager, a mortgage manager. The paper substantiates the advantage of using the blockchain technology in structuring relations related to the provision of a syndicated loan to a borrower. Particular attention is paid to the legal status of a loan manager using blockchain technology to carry out his functions of organizing and administering a syndicated loan agreement. The paper explains the peculiarity of interaction between a credit manager and other parties to the syndicated loan agreement when using blockchain technology. Legislative changes are proposed aimed at providing syndicated lending participants with the opportunity to use blockchain to organize interaction between them.

The Dollar and Corporate Borrowing Costs

We show that U.S. dollar movements affect syndicated loan terms for U.S. borrowers, even for those without trade exposure. We identify the effect of dollar movements using spread and loan amount adjustments during the syndication process. Using this high-frequency, within loan variation, we find that a one standard deviation increase in the dollar index increases spreads by up to 15 basis points and reduces loan amounts and underpricing by up to 2 percent and 7 basis points, respectively. These effects are concentrated in dollar appreciations. Our results suggest that global factors reflected in the dollar affect U.S. borrowing costs.

Lending Diversification and Interconnectedness of the Syndicated Loan Market

We investigate the effects of syndicated loan network centrality on bank performance. Syndicated loan network centrality measures the similarity and influence of the other banks within a given banks network. The network centrality constructed by syndicated loans can allow banks to gather and transfer valuable information and can thus facilitate profit-making acquisition in loan investment decisions. We use a planar maximally filtered graph to construct an interbank network using syndicated loan portfolios at the industry level. We show that the syndicated loan portfolios of high-centrality banks exhibit a higher level of portfolio diversification than those of low-centrality banks. We also document that our composite centrality measure of the bank network showed statistical significance in terms of bank performance even after controlling for the financial variables of market size, loan allocation, total asset, and loan diversification. Our findings suggest that the performance of a bank in a syndicated loan hierarchy is related to its position in this hierarchy.