High-Yield Bonds Will Help, Not Hinder, Businesses’ Recovery

By Jesse Chenard CEO of fintech MonetaGo,

One of the best indicators of stock market growth is high-yield bonds. The junk bond market is more important than ever as we recover from coronavirus – allowing companies to raise vitally needed capital and giving investors the opportunity for returns that will fuel speculation and drive growth across the whole economy. Junk bonds, or ‘high-yields’ to give them a less derogatory name, will drive the recovery just as surely as the rebounding stock market will.

Companies who have suffered with low liquidity under the pandemic need to raise capital and return to viability. According to J.P. Morgan Chase, bond-issuance has already reached $238 billion – almost double this time last year. It is clear that high-yield bonds are going to drive economic recovery and allow viable, but cash-strapped, companies to regain losses caused by Covid-19.

Companies striving to boost their capital, improve liquidity and rebuild after the pandemic need systems around issuance to be quick, effective and secure. Yet, the issuance process remains slow, costly and encumbered by legacy systems.

Avanade’s research found that up to 80% of IT budgets are allocated to keeping legacy systems running. Technology can help reform the process and give companies the funds they so badly need.

According to Bloomberg, global corporate bond issuance is on track to reach a historical high in 2020, as total capital raised neared $6.4 trillion (June)— already 71% of 2019’s total.

But the process of issuing bonds is unbelievably slow and largely manual. It takes an average of 30 stages with human intervention at each point, including physical paperwork and contact between multiple parties and intermediaries.

The fact that so many of these processes are still multi-step and using people and paper is archaic and inefficient in normal market conditions.

During the lockdown, it looks positively stone-age. And then there is the risk of data leakage and security, which are horribly compromised by existing processes. Two years ago, I visited Credit Suisse’s office on Madison Avenue where they told me that they send 20,000 to 30,000 faxes a day to carry out activities that could be very easily automated and digitized: a scary thought from a data security perspective.

It seems odd that in a world where we are used to securely accessing our personal finances at the click of a button, the same cannot be true for business finance.

This is a massive, liquid market. It needs modernizing. Add to that the fact that volumes have ballooned as crisis hit firms work to raise working capital and return to viability. That process should be entirely digitized and speeded up. Companies recovering from the pandemic deserve better than outdated, unsecure systems.

There is no question that technology is the key here. There are solutions to digitize the entire process, allowing businesses to greatly reduce their time to market and their banks to provide a vastly improved service to their corporate customers.

When normal ways of working are disrupted, it brings to light the inefficiencies in document workflows that cost businesses thousands of dollars in fraud each year, not to mention the other cost of lagging behind due to outdated processes.

There is now an opportunity to take the lessons learned from the pandemic and digitize processes that have shown they need it. Covid has forced financial services to digitize in many ways but the high-yield bond market is lagging behind. We need to bring this crucial sector up to speed. Companies deserve fast, efficient and secure issuance systems to stimulate their recovery and kick start the global economy.