Covenant Review emerged in 2006 as the first research firm to focus solely on bond and loan covenants. It provides valuable information to sophisticated investment firms about their rights as bondholders, after carrying out independent research on corporate bond terms for hedge funds, mutual funds and other investment vehicles.
After working as an investment banker for many years, the business’s founder recognized a niche gap in the market that Covenant Review could fill. When an investment firm is researching bonds which provide the most favorable market position, it must pay a lawyer to review and advise them on a 300-page ‘prospectus’ document; an essential but incredibly expensive part of advising on investments.
Covenant Review employs in-house lawyers with an investment banking background to review each prospectus, and investment analysts who summarize the lawyers’ findings into four-to-six-page legal briefs. Our client allows investment management companies to access these easily digestible reports through a subscription service, giving them legal advice in a cost-effective manner. It was looking to deliver this service via a custom web portal, which it needed external support to create.
To make its clients’ legal brief subscriptions more easily accessible, Covenant Review wanted to build a bespoke web portal with a number of specific features. Our client wanted this portal to have:
Following his initial conversations with Asahi Technologies, Covenant Review’s founder, Adam Cohen, immediately decided we had the ability to deliver the right software solution.
Our team first translated our client’s requirements into a clear blueprint, which formed the foundation of a scalable custom web portal. It had indexed, searchable databased and printer-friendly report layouts, allowing subscribers to easily access and understand key information.
We used a .Net 4.0 framework to build and deploy Covenant Review’s custom web application. Over the course of our work, our skilled team:
We created a cloud-based web application for our client that’s functional for different types of users. Paralegals and investment analysts can share legal research on the platform and investment advisors can access timely and cost-effective advice to shape their investment decisions. From the client’s perspective, account managers now have a better understanding of how subscribers interact with the application and a broad view of all users, allowing them to fine tune the experience.
Our work delivered a comprehensive workflow management system that allowed the client’s in-house analysts and legal team to easily add information to the app. Each type of employee has appropriate permissions, too. Paralegals can update bond pricing, maturity dates and other information, administrators can add and alter user access, and analysts (qualified lawyers) can update more complex information, such as bondholder rights and terms.
With this new application, subscribers can get professional looking reports in their inbox and the client can use a complex combination of parameters to tailor subscriptions according to geography, bond type and term.
“I did not reach out to other software vendors because based on initial discussions, I was confident of the abilities of the team at Asahi Technologies. In retrospective, I feel good about that decision. Trustworthiness, diligence and technical proficiency are three of the key attributes of the team that worked on this project.”
Adam Cohen, New York
Founder, Covenant Review