Santander Corporate and Investment Banking’s Private Debt Mobilization team has launched together with CrossLend a pilot with Santander Spain assets to mobilize Spanish SME and leveraged loans.

CrossLend is a Berlin-based digital debt marketplace providing technology for debt data handling as well as securitisation and distribution service.

This pilot is the very first step to build a private marketplace for assets distribution to investors. It could also become a new platform for intra-group asset rebalancing, by proactively mobilizing balance sheet assets and ultimately deploying ‘originate to share (OTS)’ business models. 

The marketplace is intended to be a new distribution channel for small loans/portfolios coming from various  businesses (retail, consumer, non-performing loans, etcetera). 

CrossLend technology will enable a complementary channel for investors to access diversified investment opportunities to optimise yields, whilst developing a technology that can contribute to building the infrastructure for a Pan-European platform. 

CrossLend’s marketplace brings an extra channel to connect Santander with the market, supporting existing settlement technologies and providing alternative settlement opportunities. It also enables implementing various applications to support new business activity (originate to share) and increases efficiency of existing businesses.

Mouro Capital, an autonomously managed venture capital fund focused on fintechs and adjacent businesses participated by Santander, invested in CrossLend in 2019.

Javier Rodríguez de Colmenares, global head of Private Debt Mobilitisation (PDM) at Santander CIB, said: “This pilot is a good example of collaboration across divisions and geographies, which is an essential factor to continue embedding innovation into the organisation. Furthermore, this is a great opportunity to work with investees from Mouro Capital such as CrossLend, to move towards a future of more industrialised asset mobilization. In turn, this could provide more tools to all divisions of the group to accelerate their balance sheet rotation velocity, enhancing their return on capital.” 

Manuel Silva Martínez, general partner at Mouro Capital, said: “We invested in CrossLend under the hypothesis that their technology is able to make capital markets more efficient, transparent, and bring together more participants. The new products that Santander has successfully piloted bring in process efficiencies and product capabilities that are a breakthrough for the industry.”

Oliver Schimek, CEO and founder of Crosslend, said: "The future of banking requires technology that industrializes today's processes and allows the bank to offer services that seamlessly integrate value. We are proud to be part of Santander's journey of digitizing the bank's backend to prevail in the competition."