Overview
The Credit Special Situations Trading Application (CSST) offers a centralized platform for managing credit-related data, including holders, issuers and their associated instruments like bank debt, letters of credit, trade claims, warrants, DIPs as well as more common securities like bonds and preferred stock.
It replaces manual processes with a streamlined, user-friendly interface, boosting efficiency and reducing operational risk. Designed for use across teams such as trading, research and sourcing, CSST provides tailored dashboards for each role, ensuring every user sees the insights most relevant to them.
Industry Challenges
Disparate Data Sources: Credit data such as issuer profiles, holdings and debt instruments, is often stored across spreadsheets, emails and legacy systems, making it hard to access, maintain and audit.
Manual, Error-Prone Processes: Many firms still rely on manual data entry and fragmented workflows, increasing operational risk and limiting scalability.
Inefficient Cross-Team Collaboration: Trading, research and sourcing teams lack a shared view of key credit data, slowing decision-making and creating inefficiencies.
Lack of Role-Specific Insights: Generic systems fail to surface the most relevant information for each team or user, reducing the impact of data on strategic decisions.
Operational Risk from Illiquidity: Private credit markets are inherently illiquid, requiring enhanced tools to track, analyze, and manage these positions effectively and in one place.
Limited Auditability and Transparency: Without a centralized system, tracking data lineage, historical changes, and decision rationale becomes difficult, posing compliance and risk challenges.
User Benefits
Centralized Data Access: Users gain a single source of truth for all credit data on issuers, holders, and instruments, including illiquid products, eliminating the need to hunt through spreadsheets or email threads.
Streamlined, Intuitive Interface: A user-friendly design simplifies navigation and reduces the learning curve, enabling faster onboarding and more efficient workflows.
Role-Based Dashboards: Tailored views for trading, research, and sourcing teams ensure each user sees the most relevant insights, accelerating decision-making.
Improved Operational Efficiency: Automating manual processes cuts down on duplication and errors, freeing up time for higher-value tasks and reducing operational risk.
Enhanced Collaboration Across Teams: With shared access to real-time data and role-specific dashboards, teams work from a common foundation, improving alignment and transparency.
Faster, Smarter Decision-Making: Access to up-to-date, well-structured data allows users to act quickly on new opportunities and market movements.
Stronger Data Governance: Centralized tracking and audit trails enhance control, compliance, and data integrity, providing users confidence in the information they rely on.
Features & Capabilities
Centralized Data Management: Offers a platform to create a unified view of credit data – including issuers, holders and instruments — reducing reliance on manual spreadsheets and siloed systems.
Issuer Overview Pages: Each issuer has a dedicated profile that consolidates key details such as related posts, exposures, and current positions – all editable and accessible from a single location.
Instrument-Level Data Capture: Supports rich data capture for each instrument, including high-level terms, interest methodologies and linked documentation for reference and compliance.
Real-Time Exposure Management: Allows fast updates to holder exposures based on new liquidity information, ensuring data stays accurate and up to date.
Secondary Transaction Tracking: Enables users to record secondary trades and automatically calculates updated exposures. All transactions are stored for historical reference and audit purposes.
Role-Specific Dashboards: Provides purpose-built views for different user groups:
- Analyst View allows quick searches by entity to view all exposures and drill into specific instruments or positions.
- Sourcing View emphasizes issuer commentary, engagement history, and audit trails for deeper relationship insights.
Interactive Posting & Commentary: Teams can post comments, update records, and capture contextual information directly within issuer profiles, enhancing collaboration and decision-making.
Full Audit Trail: Captures every post, update, and transaction with timestamps to support transparency, compliance, and accountability.
Data Management Module: Streamlines the onboarding and maintenance of issuer and holder data, helping scale operations efficiently.
Integrated Genesis Reporting: Built-in reporting functionality enables seamless data extracts and recap generation for downstream workflows or external sharing.
Integrations
- Reference Data: connects to in-house reference data systems for holder and issuer details.
- Downstream Reporting: can publish data to downstream systems for reporting and tracking purposes.
Customization & Extensibility
- Extensible to other forms of credit
- Support for building out new integrations to receive trade feeds that will auto-update holder positions
Security & Compliance
- Enterprise-Grade Authentication: Supports SSO, OAuth2, JWT, and Active Directory, ensuring secure access control.
- End-to-End Encryption & Auditability: AES-256 encryption for data at rest and in transit, with full audit trails for regulatory compliance.
- Regulatory Compliance & Surveillance: Built-in compliance monitoring aligns with MiFID II, SEC, and FINRA standards, with real-time alerts.
Component Breakdown
- Issuer & Instrument Management: Dynamic interfaces for entering, editing, and viewing issuer and instrument-level data, including deal terms, interest mechanics, and related documents.
- Exposure & Position Tracking: Maintains real-time tracking of holder exposures and positions, adjusting dynamically based on primary or secondary trade capture.
- Role-Based Dashboards: Provides tailored data views based on user role, such as Analyst and Sourcing views, enabling efficient access to relevant insights, commentary, and search functionality.
- Collaboration & Audit Layer: Enables in-app posts and commentary against any data entity, with full timestamped audit trails, promoting transparency and team collaboration across the credit lifecycle.
Event Processing Flow
- Issuer Management: Record issuer details and manage associated attributes.
- Record instrument details: As and when new instruments are issued, record these against the issuer alongside relevant documentation.
- Capture Holder Positions: input primary and secondary trades against instruments, and the system will calculate associated holder positions.
- Record Commentary: Capture posts and comments for any information pertaining to holders and issuers for all teams to see.
- Access Data: Intuitive user interface screens provide easy access to all data within the system.
