The syndicated loan market runs on 50 emails and 300 hand-typed data points per deal. Forest Park Group built a blockchain to make that go away.
Here is a fact that should not be true in 2026: when two sophisticated financial institutions agree to trade a piece of a corporate loan, it can take twenty-five days or more for the money and the paperwork to actually change hands. Twenty-five days. In that window, roughly $92 billion sits across the market in what the industry politely calls "delayed settlement exposure," and what everyone else would call capital doing nothing.
Syndicated loans - the big, chunky debt that banks arrange and then chop up among mutual funds, CLO managers, and other lenders - are one of the last corners of finance where the back office still runs on inboxes and spreadsheets. A single loan trade can require over 300 data points to be re-entered by hand and more than 50 emails to close. Around 215 basis points of return, by Forest Park's accounting, quietly leak out to closing costs. That is not a rounding error. That is the business model of an entire ecosystem of intermediaries.
Forest Park Group, founded in 2019 and based in San Mateo, looked at this and reached the same conclusion its CEO Jack Doherty did years earlier: "there had to be a better way." The company describes itself, without much modesty, as building a technological renaissance "in the industry which innovation forgot." The instrument of that renaissance is a product called LoanOS.
What makes the pitch interesting is not that it involves a blockchain - lots of pitches involve a blockchain, and most of them are worse for it. What makes it interesting is the founding observation, which is almost boringly correct: loans are not securities. They do not clear like stocks. They have covenants and consents and bespoke terms, and the reason they settle slowly is that no single party ever holds the whole truth at once. Fix the truth problem, the theory goes, and speed follows.
LoanOS is a private, permissioned, token-agnostic blockchain that acts as a shared source of truth for a loan - available to every authorized party, all the time. Around it sit two things that make it usable inside a real bank.
The settlement engine. Automates the loan closing process with smart contracts, dragging mean settlement from weeks toward T+1 and cutting the risk and cost that live in the gap.
Isolates each lender's data and hands granular operational control to credit platforms - so a shared ledger doesn't mean shared secrets. Everyone sees what they should, nothing they shouldn't.
Receive, interpret, sort, route, and trigger actions on incoming and outgoing loan data - and, crucially, talk to the legacy systems banks already run. No rip-and-replace.
The customers are institutional: banks, mutual funds, and CLO managers - the roughly 30,000 people whose days are eaten by loan operations. The value proposition to each is slightly different, but it rhymes.
For the bank arranging the loan, faster settlement and less information asymmetry means you can grow the syndicate - invite more investors into a deal - because the friction of onboarding them collapses. A bigger syndicate is a more diversified, less risky book.
For the buy-side lender, capital stops sitting frozen for a month between "yes" and "settled." Money that clears in days is money you can redeploy, which is the entire point of a liquid market.
For everyone, fewer manual re-entries means fewer errors, and a permissioned ledger means the data regulators keep asking for is already there, structured and auditable. Forest Park frames this less as disruption and more as dependability - the unglamorous kind of trust that back offices are actually built on.
Forest Park describes itself as a mix of "syndicated loan veterans and passionate experts in distributed computing" - the two tribes you'd need in the same room to attempt this.