What's actually the most painful part of creating structured products?

Greeting's monkeys!


Trying to learn more about how structured products get created in practice and where the biggest bottlenecks are.

For those working in structured credit, securitization, structured notes, ABS, CLOs, private credit, etc., what parts of the process are still surprisingly manual, slow, or frustrating?

A few things I'm curious about:

  1. How much of your day is spent in Excel versus actual analysis?
  2. Where do deals typically get held up?
  3. What's the most repetitive part of the process?
  4. How many times do structures get revised before they actually make it through?
  5. Are there internal tools that work well, or is everything held together by spreadsheets and workarounds?
  6. What takes longer than people outside the industry would expect?

I'm especially interested in the period between "we have an idea for a deal/product" and "this is ready to go in front of investors."

For example:

  1. Is building and testing structures the hard part?
  2. Is pricing the hard part?
  3. Is gathering and cleaning data the hard part?
  4. Is documentation the hard part?
  5. Is it getting everyone internally aligned and signed off?

Basically, if you could wave a magic wand and eliminate one headache from the process, what would it be?

Trying to understand where the pain points are from people who work on this stuff every day. The more specific the examples, the better.

Cheers.

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