Get ABF Off Spreadsheets

Asset-based finance started with credit cards, auto loans and trade finance. It now covers 70 to 80 kinds of collateral, with music rights and cell towers among them. Every party in a deal runs its own system, and those systems were not built to talk to each other.

In a receivables facility, the originator reports what's in the pool, monthly or weekly, in a spreadsheet. Someone at the lender checks it against the invoice PDFs and the bank statement, by hand. On a $50 to $60 million line, that can mean 1,500 new receivables each week.

Altin Kadareja spent his BlackRock years valuing the loan pools European banks were selling after the financial crisis, all of it on spreadsheets.

Eight years ago, he left to build the software he could not buy. Cardo AI connects the originator, the lender and the bank, so every party reads the same numbers. Today, it runs inside some of the biggest names in private credit.

In this episode of the Modern Capital Podcast, Altin and Marc cover:

• Why only 30% of the $40 trillion ABF market is new collateral, and where the real innovation sits
• Why banks underwrite on compliance and asset managers underwrite on return, and what that does to the loss curve
• Two months at a bank against 20 days with an asset manager: why borrowers pay a premium for private credit
• GPU financing, data centers and robotics: collateral the standard cash flow engines cannot model yet
• Why a chatbot is 2% of what AI can do for an asset manager, and what has to come first

“I want to create a technology highway, which is software, data and AI, that everyone could work better in a standardized way, and could make the market scale faster.”

Altin thinks the market cannot scale faster until every party reads the same numbers. The spreadsheet is what stops them. This is a conversation on how to fix it.

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