A fledgling credit market that lets businesses trade accounts receivable has allied with the nation's largest provider of Uniform Commercial Code filings to help buyers perform due diligence and file liens on the sellers.
The Receivables Exchange, a New Orleans start-up, said Monday that it is working with CT Lien Solutions, a unit of the Dutch data publisher Wolters Kluwer NV, to automate UCC processing, public record searching, and document filing.
Nicolas R. Perkin, a co-founder and the president of the exchange, said that it has finalized contracts with buyers holding $8 billion of deployable capital, and that the CT interface will enable faster processing of transactions.
"In an auction environment, you need to be able to file that lien instantaneously on the completion of that transaction," he said.
The exchange, which plans to open to the public this fall in a phased rollout that is expected to run through November, calls itself a real-time, online market for privately held small and medium companies to gain access to working capital.
The exchange announced in June that its charter program had surpassed $500 million in accounts receivable turnover since it began sales efforts with certain users in April, and Mr. Perkin said that figure surpassed $1 billion last week.
The exchange estimates the potential market for business-to-business accounts receivable at more than $17 trillion a year.
The exchange has backing from Prism VentureWorks LLC and Fidelity Ventures, the venture capital arm of Fidelity Investments, and uses an electronic trading system based on the New York Stock Exchange's bond platform.
Mr. Perkin said his exchange will allow capital providers — including factoring companies, bank asset-backed lending units, and hedge funds — to target receivables accounts from sellers by region, industry, loan amount, credit rating, fees, size of invoice, or other criteria.
"Buyers can acquire buckets of invoices, or they can buy portions of invoices," he said. "We can send a notification to your PDA every time a seller lists an invoice."
CT Lien Solutions says it is the nation's largest compiler of UCC filings, which lenders can use to take liens on property to be used as collateral for commercial loans.
The filings are also used for corporate due diligence, mergers and acquisitions, real estate, secured lending, and bankruptcy claims.
Gene Lasky, the vice president and general manager of CT Lien Solutions, said secured lenders are able to access his company's databases from their own loan documentation systems over secure data connections through its interface with the Receivables Exchange.
"They want to understand what the risk profile is, how many people might have claims on that receivable or that debtor," Mr. Lasky said.
CT Lien Solutions' immediate parent, CT, a company that was once known as Corporation Trust Co. and is itself a unit of Wolters Kluwer Corporate Legal Services, provides similar interfaces to more than 100 providers of secured lending and leases, he said.
The lien unit was organized in June, taking the company's UCC Direct, which primarily served the financial industry, and combining its services with other UCC activities.
Mr. Perkin said his exchange is in touch with 90% of the buyers of receivables in North America and western Europe, though it has larger ambitions.
"The intent is to take this global, but we're starting in the U.S.," he said. "We want to prove it here in the U.S., and then we will grow from there."
