The operating system
for trustworthy lending
There is a number at the center of Jack Doherty's professional life: 23. That is how many days it takes, on average, to settle a syndicated loan in North America. In Europe, add another three weeks on top of that. For an asset class that moves more than a trillion dollars through the global economy, the back-office plumbing is distressingly medieval - faxes, spreadsheets, siloed data systems, and a coordination layer held together largely by manual effort and institutional inertia.
Doherty grew up in New Orleans, went north to Philadelphia, and came out of the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in Mathematical Economics. He is the kind of person who quantifies friction. His early career reads like a deliberate inventory of everything that touches leveraged credit: law clerk, mortgage credit specialist, advisory consultant, foreign policy research. Then two stints at Pretium Partners - first as a corporate strategy analyst, then on the CLO credit research team. It was at Pretium where the problem became unavoidable.
CLOs are complex instruments, but the inefficiency Doherty kept bumping into wasn't in the modeling. It was in the plumbing. Multi-party loan syndications involve banks, agents, borrowers, and investors who all need to agree on the same facts at the same time. Instead, they spend weeks reconciling data across incompatible legacy systems. Settlement delays are not a quirk or an exception - they are the default state of the market.
There had to be a better way - a future where leveraged loans are traded in days, not weeks.
- Jack Doherty, Co-Founder & CEO, Forest Park GroupIn April 2019, Doherty co-founded Forest Park Group to build that better way. The company's product, LoanOS, is a private, permissioned, token-agnostic distributed ledger platform designed to serve as a single source of truth for syndicated loan data. The architecture choice is deliberate: not a public blockchain with its volatility and regulatory complexity, but a closed network where participating banks and lenders control data sovereignty entirely.
LoanOS uses API-driven interfaces to receive, interpret, sort, and route loan data - then applies smart contracts to automate the settlement logic that currently requires armies of back-office staff. The results, per Forest Park's own research, are striking: 1,000x greater efficiency compared to competing smart contract computations, at a cost of just $0.005 per operation. The platform projects a 215 basis point increase in ROE for participating banks, a 25% expansion in syndicate sizes, and a 4% reduction in credit costs for borrowers.
In January 2021, Forest Park closed a $1.2M seed round from EvoNexus, a San Diego-based startup accelerator with a history of backing deep-tech companies, and Advanced Blockchain AG, a publicly listed blockchain infrastructure firm. For a company solving a $1 trillion problem, the round was modest. The bet is that you don't need to out-spend Wall Street. You just have to out-engineer it.
The company has also built Parlake, a SaaS settlement coordination tool running on the same DLT infrastructure, aimed at compressing trade closing from weeks to days through automated approvals and middle/back office workflow automation. Forest Park has noted, with some care, that the burnout problem in leveraged finance falls disproportionately on women - a point Doherty addressed directly in a 2023 piece on making the workspace more sustainable for those processing loan settlements manually.
The team Doherty has assembled around himself is conspicuously heavy on Wall Street pedigree. CTO Tom Ciborski brings deep distributed systems experience. Executive Director of Business Development Nancy del Genio spent over 30 years at Bankers Trust, Deutsche Bank Securities, and HSBC - the kind of institutional network that can actually get a permissioned blockchain pilot into a major bank's systems. Academic advisor Dr. Olav Sorenson, who holds the Joseph Jacobs Chair in Entrepreneurial Studies at UCLA Anderson and has published more than 90 papers, provides external intellectual validation rarely seen at a sub-$2M seed stage company.
"Forest Park Group believes that our clients' data is theirs and theirs alone," the company's published materials state. In a market where data asymmetry is a profit center for incumbents, that positioning is either naive or quietly revolutionary. Based on the architecture of LoanOS, it appears to be the latter.
The company's full name is Forest Park Group. Its founder goes by Jack - not John, as formal records list him. His company email begins with jack@. Small details, but telling ones: this is a person comfortable going by a different name than the one on his diploma, building infrastructure nobody currently uses for a market that mostly doesn't know it needs him yet.