The Complexity of Simplicity
This week on the blog, our Co-Founder and CTO Robert Taylor shares his thoughts on the client onboarding process for the Origin Documentation product.
This week I’d like to give some insight into how we go from an issuer expressing interest in issuing on Origin’s platform, all the way through to the deal being announced in the market.
Ultimately our objective is to satisfy each of our customer’s relatively bespoke requirements. We work extremely closely with our customers to ensure that their documentation objectives are met and that structured transaction data flows where it needs to (e.g third-party integrations, internal booking systems etc.).
Our mental model
Over the years we’ve developed a wide ranging toolkit that contains all kinds of tooling that we can apply to each client situation – a bit like LEGO blocks!
This incredibly versatile toolkit includes the likes of:
AI-powered structured data extraction from issuance documentation
Flexible editing of documents without losing structure data (surprisingly hard!)
Ability to support any number of documents per trade (also pretty hard)
Issuer-specific rules for default values across different trade types
Blackline comparison functionality versus pro-formas
Generating booking files
Bespoke at scale
Every client has somewhat bespoke documentation requirements, ranging from which documents are required/optional, which integrations they’re interested in from obtaining instant XS ISINs, to e-listings, to supporting Docusign, to sending the information electronically to Agents and much more.
Origin’s documentation product needs to integrate a broad range of needs.
We've had customers who require over 20 different documents per transaction; issuances in dual language format; private placements with bespoke outputs; structured notes with incredibly complex documentation requirements all done via API; we even handle syndicated trades with multiple dealers and law firms all collaborating simultaneously.
The process
Once we’ve clearly defined the issuer’s requirements, we map them to the aforementioned toolkit that we’ve developed over the years.
Then the real fun begins! We make documents machine readable using pro formas and previous trades as reference so that when the platform renders them they perfectly match what the user expects.
As part of this process we spend a lot of time setting up issuer specific rules, which allows us to define default field values. e.g “all USD trades are in Registered format” or “the minimum denomination should be 1k for EUR bullets and 100k for EUR callables”. These can get a lot more complex!
Finally to iron out any last kinks in the process, we always do test trades with our clients prior to a real trade.
The ultimate sophistication
It’s super rewarding to see trades being executed flawlessly. While our stringent quality process involves a significant time investment, once it's been done once the documents come out the same every time. This is because the system is template-based and guarantees high-quality outputs.
Leonardo da Vinci believed that, “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” We feel that way about Origin’s Documentation product. A huge amount of thought, engineering, and testing goes into producing a seamless user experience for our users. We sincerely hope that our customers enjoy using the product as much as we enjoy building it.