Cordiant is a specialist global infrastructure and real assets manager with a sector-led approach to providing growth capital solutions to promising mid-sized companies in Europe, North America and selected global markets. Cordiant focuses on the next generation of infrastructure and real assets and is currently managing equity and debt funds. Cordiant is a pioneer ESG and Impact investor with offices in Montreal, London, Luxembourg and Sao Paulo. Testimonial provided in this case study comes from Tufuantsi Daniel, Senior VP, Cordiant Capital.
While Cordiant focuses on infrastructure and real assets investments, embedded finance represents a massive new opportunity they’ve been studying for some time. They are considering a few investments in the embedded finance space to confirm their thesis.
They identified a fintech company they were excited about and were looking for a partner (ie data agent) to provide comprehensive data analytics, visualization, and a reporting suite to create a seamless investment monitoring experience.
“Embedded finance and structured finance have always been something we’ve been interested in, and that interest coincided with a lot of growth we’re seeing in fintech, mostly in emerging markets. There are high quality companies raising substantial capital to address critical problems in these countries, and we see a significant opportunity.”
Cordiant was introduced to Cascade through a fintech (embedded finance) company they were in diligence with. They were immediately impressed by the platform’s ability to help them streamline the diligence and back testing process as well as monitor their transactions, key covenants, and cash flows.
“Cascade’s ability to stay independent and neutral for both parties is extremely important because some of the metrics we track and rely on for decision making are not always clear-cut. Their ability to demonstrate the impact of numbers or calculations we’d agreed serves as an important regulating mechanism for the whole relationship between borrower and creditor.”
Without Cascade, the Cordiant team and the borrower would have spent a significant amount of time building models in excel to test their assumptions and covenants. With the Cascade platform, they were able to test and benchmark these data points and finalize their negotiation in a fraction of the time. The ability to consume near real-time data throughout the life of the transaction also gave their investment committee added comfort entering a fairly new space.
Moving forward the investor is able to monitor the entire operation using the Cascade manage feature, including:
Cordiant leveraged the Cascade covenant library to test multiple covenants knowing they were industry standards and then adapting to the specific concerns of their Investment Committee.
“For us, knowing that several other institutional asset managers were already leveraging the Cascade platform and were quite happy with it was a source of comfort. We will definitely use Cascade in future transactions. It’s affordable, reliable, and the level of service has been excellent.”