ClearPar: A legacy of delivery. A future of possibility.

On Friday, January 9^th, 2026, S&P Global Market Intelligence celebrates the 25^th anniversary of the first loan trade electronically settled using the ClearPar platform. Over this period, the loan market has grown exponentially across the globe, with technology prioritized by firms of all sizes in their approach to issuing, trading and maintaining loan positions. Throughout this transformation, two things have remained constant: the core loan trade settlement requirements and ClearPar as the change agent. ClearPar’s technology interfaces with legacy workflows, transforming traditional processes into scalable solutions while preserving business continuity.

While the standards and process of loan trade settlement have remained largely unchanged since the days of fax, ClearPar has modernized execution. Parties still use standardized confirmation documents, agents effectuate transfers with legal templates, and funding details are presented within ClearPar’s funding memo for payment processing. Over 25 years, annual allocations have grown from one hundred thousand, to 2.5 million in 2025, with the average allocations per trade increasing from less than 2 to 4. Continuous investment and key feature releases have enabled ClearPar to support a market that has grown over 10% year-over-year six times in the last decade, and over 20% three times.

Originally, loan trades closed over fax, with documents circulated for signature. ClearPar’s initial innovation was creating a network and interface for parties to meet, review, sign, and settle trades. This central meeting point now serves over 8,000 active users daily.

Supporting a growing network

Two early breakthroughs that fueled ClearPar’s growth are direct integrations with clients’ internal systems and the homegrown Settlement Date Coordination (SDC) workflow.

ClearPar now integrates with over 200 client institutions via its proprietary Message Director platform. Through standardized messaging, parties, agents, custodians, and service providers send, confirm, allocate trades, and consume settlement details in real time into internal systems. The largest dealers send trades for creation in ClearPar immediately after desk processing, ensuring instant exposure to trade details. Over 150 buysides directly integrate with S&P Global’s WSO portfolio system, enabling immediate trade matching and allocation. Electronic delivery and allocations allow documents to be ready for execution, often before the end of T+1. Leading agents consume settlements so internal systems reflect correct positions post-close, eliminating delays from manual processing. Investments from clients and ClearPar/WSO have built a foundation for growth and shifted resources from manual to constructive tasks.

While many entry, confirmation, and settlement actions are automated, experienced personnel log in daily to identify and close trades quickly. A significant amount of the manual effort surrounding these tasks is facilitated using ClearPar’s industry-standard Settlement Date Coordination, or SDC. Using SDC, parties to a trade can state their readiness to close both manually and automatically, allowing agents to access ClearPar and pull reporting to see all trades ready to close on a particular day. SDC reporting has become the backbone of daily workflows for agents seeking to close thousands of transactions per day. This centralized, organized list of trades is the assembly line for which thousands of transactions flow through ClearPar every single day.

With the increase interoperability between integrations and features like Settlement Date Coordination, clients have been able to create further efficiencies where the whole comes our greater than the sum of the parts. Parties are able to automate signatures and approvals to ensure trades get in front of agents sooner. Agents can automate checks on trades (such as seller position or buyer eligibility) allowing optimized prioritization of trades and maximized efficiency.

Securing data flow in a manual market

Manual processes inherently introduce potential for inadvertent errors, and opportunities for bad actors. Historically, the loan market was prone to processing errors in payments and entity data. ClearPar, after automating settlement workflows, expanded its network to include custodians and agent back offices. Through Custodian Services and ADFlow, ClearPar’s reach extended beyond trade date to close, impacting post-settlement processing and agent lender records to ensure proper payment and notice distribution throughout the facility lifecycle.

Previously, buysides had to deliver documents to custodian banks—either by downloading and emailing packets, or worse, printing and faxing them. This daily workflow could require hours from team members simply to deliver documents to multiple recipients. With ClearPar Custodian Services Document Delivery launched in 2015, many custodians began consuming documents directly from ClearPar’s automation. Loan market professionals saved hours by triggering document delivery with a single action, and soon, most trades involved a consuming custodian.

Automating document delivery was a milestone, but further integration was needed. That next step was taken in 2020 when the first custodian went live with Custodian Messaging. This meant that when the client actioned the trade on ClearPar, not only did the document packet deliver to the custodian but also did a standardized message to update the custodian system in real-time. The entire manual nature of parties informing custodians of settled trades, or needed fundings, was automated; and with that automation came reporting, audit histories and scalability to accommodate a continuously growing market.

Further to the complete data sets being transmitted at settlement, ClearPar and the Loan Platforms team invested further in securing the underlying data. How valuable is secure data transmission if the data itself cannot be relied on? With the release of ADFlow, a secure workflow tool for parties to enter wire instruction and contact information, the ClearPar system further secured valuable entity data and reduce exposure to fraud. Parties, themselves, now entered and four-eye checked their own wire data and other key entity data; and contributed to a data stream consumed directly into agent internal systems. Now, any changes to these key data points would be transmitted to participating agents in real time ensuring payments, notices and data room invites went to the most current contacts.

Through continuous, adaptive, technology enhancement, ClearPar and S&P Global’s Lending Solutions have been able to champion substantive evolution across the entire loan market. Manual workflows, data entry and processing has been left in the past, and in its place are new, widely adopted workflows ensuring the market scales securely and not recklessly. In 2025, after ten years of effort in adopting users to new technologies, over 70% of loan trades delivered electronically to the custodian and 99% of entities on ClearPar are onboarded to ADFlow. In this time, ClearPar has achieved its objective of ensuring each step of the trade lifecycle, from entry, confirmation, funding and now even ownership, prioritizes security and minimizes risk.

ClearPar: A legacy, a future

It is only through ClearPar’s continuous investment in new technology and reluctance to sit idly, that it has supported the loan market through the global financial crisis of 2009 and the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. During the latter, as most worked from home, ClearPar saw volumes increase 23% from the previous year. This was a testament to what is widely regarded across the market as the most experienced, knowledgeable and connected group of loan market professionals supporting the platform every day.

As I enter my 21^st year working at ClearPar, I am motivated every day to match the hard work and dedication of our impressive team. Our Head of Operations and Lead Developer all have been here since day one, and that’s only two of many more tenured than me.

That expertise extends beyond internal but also to our user base. Many former ClearPar colleagues now make up the ranks of top clients, and other users have become as expert in navigating the platform as anyone we have internally. Our hosted events look more like reunions as ClearPar not only is synonymous with the loan market network but has achieved peer-status with its clients, a partnership and responsibility we bear with pride.

For each one of these twenty-five years the ClearPar team has set out to move the market forward via enhancements to the ClearPar system and workflows. In 2026, as we celebrate this feat, we also mark the first year of the next twenty-five. With the growth of restructured credit agreements, private credit and new automations we are excited to deliver on the known needs of the market, and also the unknown that will present itself in the days, years, and decades, to come.

We’ll be celebrating this milestone throughout the year with special activities and insights, so please be on the lookout and join us in marking this important chapter.

Don’t miss our first ClearPar Connect Live session of the year on January 15, where we’ll recap the highlights of 2025 and offer an exclusive preview of the innovations coming in 2026. Stay informed and connected with the latest developments in the loan market!