Medium Term Notes Issuance

Framesofts FON Platform is the foundation for a business process template made available for typical workflows in the Medium Term Notes (MTN) issuance business.

where static, pre-programmed workflows fail to meet the ever evolving needs.

Current Practice

The reconciliation of project-specific legal documentation related to MTN issues is an iterative process which can take several weeks or months depending on scope and complexity. In addition to the basic negotiation with contract partners, time-consuming internal reconciliation and approval procedures regarding content, terms and conditions and legal wording are typically required. A mixture of fax, e-mail, phone conversation and mail is currently being used for both external and internal communication. The complexity of the external and internal reconciliation/negotiation coupled with a variety of heterogeneous communication means inevitably leads to unacceptable operational risk, duplication of efforts and low efficiency.

A lot of effort has to be invested in order to ensure that all participants always have consistent and up-to-date information. This effort increases further if participants reside in geographically dispersed locations and different time zones.

Solution

Based on FON Framesoft has implemented an MTN platform supporting typical workflows found in the process of issuing MTNs. The MTN platform supports the generation of the complete set of required legal documentation according to market standards and regulatory requirements. The respective workflows for the set-up and reconciliation/negotiation of the documents are prepared as templates. This means that a set of tasks together with roles and documents is held as the basis for the rapid initiatiation of, e.g., a new drawing of a Medium Term Note for a certain issuer.

A repository of template pricing supplements, term sheets, letters etc. allows users to quickly devise a new set of legal documentation for a new issue.

Benefits

The adoption of MTN platform allows to achieve the following benefits:

  • extensive MIS reporting for overall controll of all processes
  • Compliance with corporate policy and regulatory requirements through validators automatically monitoring guidelines
  • Time savings by generating the relevant documentation automatically
  • Time savings by letting all parties revise documents online
  • Cost Savings by virtue of an electronic documentation management system replacing extensive paper documentation and manual document retrieval
  • Cost Savings incurred during the production of the final documentation; electronic files become the basis for minor revisions and editing by external printing companies
  • Reduction of legal and operational risk through the automatic creation of draft documents
  • Transparent cost accounting on a project basis by virtue of the electronically available information of all project workflow data
  • Statistics about all programs, drawings or stand alone issues - e.g. weekly reports showing the status of all active transactions

Functional Modules

The platform is based on the following functional modules:

  • Repository:
    The repository holds all the information necessary for the creation of the documentation. It supplies the Document Workbench with the necessary document templates and information about the objects referred to in the document drafts.

  • Document Composer:
    The Document Composer is the user interface for the creation and editing of the documents. All documents are marked up using XML. Data (economic terms) can be encapsulated into the documents in FpML compliant form. Besides text, graphics and layout information the Document Composer also allows users to define complex control flow instructions ( loops, if-then-else etc) allowing them to define complex documents.

  • Negotiation Platform:
    The negotiation platform allows multi-party, multi-document negotiations including the monitoring of due dates. Complex workflows can be configured.

  • Document Management System:
    The finalized version of the legal documentation can be filed for archiving purposes in a Document Management System. E-mails can also be archived. Documentation in paper format (execution copies) can be scanned and archived in the Document Management System.