Applications
June 2026
Use Cases.
The frame
The first thing Ravariant publishes is a shared checklist. Picture a conforming mortgage: a home loan built to a common set of rules so it can be bundled with loans just like it and compared on equal terms. Ravariant publishes that kind of checklist for loans made against a stake in a private fund. The second thing is a loss figure for each group, counted after the fact by outside auditors. It is a record of what happened, not a guess.
The boxes below name each reader of those two things and the plain action it takes: the loan desk that builds to the checklist, the risk team that reads the loss figure into its own spreadsheets, and the automated system that pulls the figure as a plain field.
Underwriting to the standard
The loan itself in plain terms: an investor owns a stake in a private fund and, instead of selling it, borrows against it. A lender hands over cash and holds the stake as security until repaid. NAV is the fund's own statement of what its holdings are worth, so the loan is sized off that stated value. Until now each loan was one of a kind, written under one private letter, so none could be grouped or compared on equal footing.
The shared checklist fixes that, the same way a conforming mortgage does. Build the loan to a common set of rules and it can be grouped, because it matches every other loan built the same way; it can be rated, because a rating can describe the whole group; and it can be compared, because the group it joins has a published figure attached. So a loan built to the checklist is no longer a black box.
| What it gains | In plain terms | Who makes it happen |
|---|---|---|
| It qualifies | The loan counts as part of a group only when it ticks every box on the published checklist, not when one person says so | The lender chooses to follow the checklist |
| It can be grouped | It matches every other loan built to the same checklist, so it sits in a group instead of standing alone | The loan desk builds it to the checklist |
| It can be rated | A rating can describe the whole group, instead of someone having to read one private deal end to end | A rating firm reads the shared checklist |
| It can be compared | It joins a group that already has a published figure attached, so there is a common yardstick to judge it by | Doc 00 covers the pooled uses |
Because the loan follows a published checklist, the loan desk can show a regulator or an auditor exactly which rules it met. A private one of a kind deal gives them nothing shared to check against. The next page shows how the same checklist, plus a cushion figure, shapes how much a lender will lend per dollar of fund value.
Advance rates and pricing
The advance rate is how much a lender will lend per dollar of fund value. Lend sixty cents against a dollar of stated value and the advance rate is sixty percent. The cushion is the slice of loss the deal can soak up before the lender's own money is touched. Ravariant publishes a figure for how big that cushion needs to be for each group, drawn from how those groups have behaved. The lender's own credit committee still sets the outer limits; the checklist and the cushion figure tell it where a given group lands inside those limits.
| The term | The old way: lean on the manager's own number | The new way: lean on the checklist and the cushion figure |
|---|---|---|
| How much to lend per dollar | Set against the manager’s own statement of value | Set against a known group of loans and a published cushion figure |
| How big a cushion | Sized by gut feel, with nothing concrete to point to | Sized to the cushion figure Ravariant publishes for the group |
| What extra to charge | Padded for risk the lender cannot point to a source for | Backed line by line by a published figure anyone can check |
| Paper trail | A judgment call kept in a private file | A checklist and a figure, each with a clear meaning and a version |
These loans commonly charge a base rate plus four to six extra percentage points. Part of that extra exists only because the lender cannot point to a shared source for the risk it carries. A lender that follows the checklist and reads the cushion figure can defend its price piece by piece. The inputs are the same for everyone who reads them, so two lenders can land on different amounts to lend, each defensible to its own committee, because the limits stay theirs.
Risk and capital models
A risk and capital model is the set of spreadsheets a lender uses to decide how much spare cash to set aside against the loans it holds. The more it might lose, the more it holds back. A computer can pull both published things, the counted loss figure and the cushion figure, straight into those spreadsheets. Each arrives as a clean value with a clear meaning, a date, and a version stamp, so the lender can feed counted losses into its cushion math without a person reading a document first.
| What it pulls in | Why a computer can read it straight |
|---|---|
| The counted loss figure | How much the loans in this group actually lost, tallied after the fact, fed straight into how much cash to set aside. |
| The cushion figure | How big a buffer the group needs, read in without the lender having to build its own model from scratch. |
| One clear meaning | Each value stands for one stated thing, so the computer drops it into one slot with nothing to interpret. |
| A date and a version | A known date and a version stamp let the computer line up values by period and rerun an old calculation exactly. |
Because every value carries a clear meaning, a date, and a version, the lender can rerun the spreadsheets against the exact figures read on a given day and get the same answer. The figures describe a whole group, while the lender's book is made of specific loans, so they guide the math without replacing the risk team's own loan by loan review.
Settlement lives in the lead document
One more set of uses lives entirely in the lead document, Doc 00, The Settlement Standard for NAV Loan Risk. Those uses build on a pooled, balanced set of these loans, and Doc 00 is the only place they are spelled out. This document stays with the three direct readers: the loan desk, the lender setting terms, and the risk team.
The link is the shared checklist from page 2. A loan built to it can be grouped, and a group of such loans is what the lead document builds on. The checklist and the cushion figure here are the raw inputs; what gets built on a pooled set of them is the subject of Doc 00.
| Use | Where to read it |
|---|---|
| The loan desk builds to the checklist | This document, page 2 |
| The lender sets how much to lend and what to charge | This document, page 3 |
| The risk team feeds the figures into its cushion math | This document, page 4 |
| Uses built on a pooled set of loans | Doc 00, The Settlement Standard for NAV Loan Risk |
| How the checklist and the figure are made | Doc 02, How the Numbers Are Made |
For the checklist and the figure these readers rely on, see Doc 01, Numbers You Can Settle On. For the real fund example behind the groups, see Doc 03, mGLOBAL.