Sydney, 14 September 2017: Clayton Utz has advised Australian Technology Innovators Pty Ltd (ATI) on its $350 million $A Term Loan B (TLB) raising – a landmark deal for the Australian debt market. ATI owns two leading Australian technology companies, InfoTrack and LEAP Legal Software.
The transaction was co-led by Clayton Utz capital markets and finance partners Stuart Byrne and Alex Schlosser.
It represents the first stand-alone domestic TLB deal for a corporate borrower which is both Australian-dollar denominated and also governed by Australian-law, and is a "game-changer", according to Stuart Byrne.
Alex Schlosser agreed: "In the past, we've seen private equity sponsors and certain Australian corporate borrowers tapping into the US TLB market where the transactions were either $US denominated and then swapped back into $A, or more recently, $A denominated but still governed by New York law. As a fully Australian-law deal, the ATI deal is a clear sign that the institutional lending market has come of age in Australia which is likely to encourage more corporate borrowers in Australia to tap the "covenant-lite" terms of the TLB market."
Alex said the shift towards institutional investors taking a greater share of the term lending market in Australia had been long expected, with tighter capital and liquidity requirements under Basel III likely contributing to the increased uptake of term debt by institutional non-bank lenders.
"Whilst we are seeing a large proportion of institutional debt coming from offshore, there has also been some exceptional growth in the Australian institutional debt market," said Alex, who recently advised CBA as Arranger of the $A500m multicurrency syndicated loan facility to Metrics Credit Partners, a significant Australian senior debt fund.
Stuart said Infotrack and LEAP Legal Software, which use modern software-as-a-Service (SaaS) models, were both successful Australian technology companies that were examples of the growing technology-led sector of the Australian economy. "LEAP Legal Software is the exclusive Australian provider of the LEAP legal practice management software, and InfoTrack provides a premium cloud-based integrated search and services platform for professionals," Stuart noted.
He added: "It's always exciting acting for growing tech companies like ATI, LEAP Legal Software and InfoTrack, and even more so when the entire team is working together to execute innovative transactions like this Australian TLB."
Stuart and Alex were assisted by an experienced team of special counsel, senior associates and lawyers comprising Kate O'Donovan, Patricia Paton, Steve Siopis, Annella Cox and Jeffrey Tang.
The Joint Lead Arrangers and Bookrunners on the deal were Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan.