One of the less famous parts of the financial world is syndicated lending, yet it is easily the embodiment of much of the best aspects of finance. A syndicated loan is a structured debt that has one borrower and several lenders who work together to get that borrower the money it needs. Syndicated lending is a way to spread risk and help different banks, investors, and other financial parties the exposure to a company they want.
Syndicated loans, then, are a way to meet the need of the borrower (for liquidity) with the need of the lender (low risk diversified investing). It functions in much the same way as the stock market, helping various equity holders get the exposure they can afford and want in the companies they want, without overexposure to companies they do not want. Syndicated lending is an important part of the commercial banking world, and it is normal for big banks like Citigroup (C), JPMorgan (JPM), Goldman Sachs (GS) and others to work together on deals that get cash to borrowers.
From this perspective, syndicated lending is the result of a symbiotic partnership between different companies that, on the surface, are competitors. In many ways, investment banks compete with each other for business, but syndication is where competition turns into cooperation to get the best outcome for all parties. And since this is not a zero sum game, it is far from collusion, cartel behavior, or any other kind of corruption. Simply put, it’s a way of using market forces by working together.
Syndicated lending isn’t the only form of syndication. Syndicates are well known in the startup and private equity world; these are entities that usually have a group of stakeholders that will regularly receive investment opportunities from the syndicate, and those stakeholders can then decide whether to invest or not. The syndicate’s value is in matchmaking between companies needing capital and investors looking to invest as well as the syndicate’s ability to find high value companies and not promote low value ones. The stakeholders that subscribe to a syndicate can be funds competing against one another in other contexts, but in the context of the syndicate there is a common interest in getting high value companies and seeing those companies succeed.
Partnerships between competing firms are more common in the financial world than many people believe, and the syndication of investment opportunities is a good example of this cooperation at work. Financiers who work in this sector tend to be very charismatic people pleasers, the sort who can make investors feel confident and companies feel valued. For them to succeed, they need to think of markets as non-zero-sum games and finance as something besides a cutthroat full contact sport.