An interview with Kaushik Majumdar, Vice President, LexLoan Account Management & Delivery
For nearly fifteen years, LexLoan™ has provided exceptional support to leading financial institutions in the management of the entire syndicated loan lifecycle. The professionals at LexLoan™ have settled more than 320,000 trades with a commitment valued of nearly $2 trillion. The highly experienced and specialized team manages a loan portfolio of nearly $10 billion on the Agency side of the business. This makes LexLoan™ one of the largest syndicated loans operations in both the U.S. and European markets. LexLoan™ further brings UnitedLex’s legal expertise to the market, having successfully drafted, negotiated, and reviewed more than 1,000 NDAs and over 50,000 PAR/Distressed trading documents like Credit Agreements, Assignment Agreements, Funding Memos, etc. In this interview, Kaushik Majumdar, VP of Global Financial Services and Contracting Operations at UnitedLex, talks about how LexLoan™ has transformed the industry with its unique blend of people, processes, and technology.
Kaushik, what does LexLoan™ do and who do you work with?
LexLoan™ is a leading service provider to financial institutions in the U.S. and European markets that operate under the umbrella of the LSTA and LMA respectively. We provide end-to-end middle office and front office support through the entire lifecycle of syndicated loans. This ranges from onboarding and originations to loan servicing to trade settlement (Primary, Secondary and Distressed). We provide these services from our offices in New York; Durham, N.C.; London; and Gurgaon, India. We also have offices from where we deliver services based on client needs at short notice in Bulgaria, Germany, Switzerland and Mexico, as well as Overland Park, Kansas, and Austin, Texas. In late 2023, we expanded our service offerings to Loan Servicing, or what is referred to in the market as the Agency side of the business. We now manage a significant portfolio of deals, end-to-end, valued close to $10B with more than 4,000 lenders.
Our customers tend to be Fortune 200 investment banks, but we also support boutique and niche financial institutions.
How did this offering originate and what was the need you saw from clients?
LexLoan™ began in 2011, and went through a significant expansion in 2012 when we spun off and rebuilt Credit Suisse’s syndicated Loan Closing operations. The client was unable to scale their market participation in the syndicated loan markets in the U.S. and Europe without an enormous increase in operating cost. We transformed it by diversifying the operating model to create greater efficiencies in the right places by expanding operations to Gurgaon India, ultimately enabling the client to scale up dramatically.
Currently, 70% of the work we do is delivered from Gurgaon, with direct oversight and quality assurance from our team members in London, New York, and Durham. The LexLoan™ team has grown to more than 50 specialized experts across the globe.
Why do clients turn to LexLoan™ for this type of work?
When UnitedLex established LexLoan™, we brought in talent who already had over 10 years of industry experience in both the LSTA and LMA markets. Since our team retention rate is over 87%, that means our team is now one of the world’s most experienced in the sector. This depth of expertise enabled us to start, what we believe to be, the first front office loan closing operation based out of India to provide full support to our clients’ trading desks. The comprehensive nature and amount of experience within our LexLoan™ team are important differentiators for our customers. But we also bring our perspective as a legal service provider, with a long history of helping clients fulfill business objectives through tech-enabled solutions.
For example, in our decision to do loan closings in India we didn’t want to dilute the loan closing process, so we invested heavily in training to replicate the exact operating model in India for Primary and Secondary Loan Closing operations that we have in the U.S. and UK. This was done deliberately and thoughtfully as a way to better meet client needs and market demands without compromising quality.
Prior to expanding our operations in India, we had streamlined the loan closing process in a few ways, most significantly by eliminating multiple handoffs between multiple teams and collapsing them into a seamless process with the loan closers. This brought about speed and transparency in the process, which clients’ trading desks immediately felt, and built trust with them by eliminating the risk of miscommunication or oversights. All this leads to faster answers and greater accountability, making it easier to escalate issues, and impose robust quality controls.
These significant transformational initiatives by UnitedLex deliver measurable results for our clients. When we started LexLoan™, the average cost per trade was $350+ when making 10,000-12,000 trades per year. By 2016 we brought that down to $110 per trade, and by 2018 we were operating at $70 per trade. At the same time, one of our clients was able to more than double their market participation from approximately 12,000 trades per year to over 40,000 trades per year, bringing significant revenue and margin boost to the client. Similarly, we reduced the annual cost of servicing loans, end-to-end, by approximately 40% or more to be less than $48,000 per deal per year, which also had a significant positive impact on the clients’ margins.
While much of our business is handled in India, we do take the specialties and capabilities of our global teams into account. For example, we don’t settle Distressed trades in India. These are settled in the London and New York Domain Centers due to the complexity and uniqueness nature.
Tell us a little about your background and what brought you to UnitedLex.
I began my career with GE Capital International Services, back in 1999, which later went on to become Genpact. During my time there I worked mainly in core accounting, then fixed and variable annuities before returning to financial services in wealth and income management space. I also got Six Sigma project certified and Project Management certified by GE during my time there. In 2007, I joined UnitedLex, where I worked as a transition manager for our Contracting and Trademark Managed Services operations. In 2011, I was seconded to Credit Suisse onsite in New York. That’s when the LexLoan™ opportunity arose and eventually translated into our LexLoan™ operations today. I led the operations at LexLoan™ between 2013 and 2024, before moving into an Account Manager role for LexLoan™, and I’m excited to lead the team as LexLoan™ becomes more generally available in the market.
How do people find out more about LexLoan™? You can visit our website: HERE
