Chicago, IL — July 22, 2026  

By Karen Slagle, Senior Product Specialist at Lamina

This is the second installment in a four-part series exploring how syndicated deals are structured and executed across lenders over time. You can read part 1 here.

Manual work is often treated as a symptom of outdated processes. In syndicated lending, it can be something more revealing: a signal that the structure of a deal created operational complexity that was never fully accounted for.

Manual work shows up in syndicated lending through spreadsheets, shadow tracking, workarounds, extra reviews, manual calculations after amendments, and follow-up emails to confirm what a notice really means. These steps are familiar across syndicated lending, participated lending, and private credit transactions involving multiple lenders. They are often treated as normal parts of the process.

But manual work is not always just an operational inconvenience. It can be a design signal. It often indicates that the economics of a deal received careful attention, while the operational effort required to support that deal throughout its lifecycle received far less.

That distinction matters. A customized fee structure may help win a borrower relationship. A tailored reporting requirement may address a specific credit concern. A unique lender allocation may support syndication strategy. An amendment may preserve economics or respond to changing borrower needs.

The issue is not the business decision itself. In many cases, these structures are exactly what the deal requires. The challenge is that complexity is often priced commercially before it is fully costed operationally.

A deal team may understand the economics of a structure, but the human effort required to support that structure over time is harder to see. Who will calculate it? Validate it? Reconcile it? Explain it to participating lenders? Track the exceptions?

That is where the cost of complexity moves from the deal model into the operating model.

Industry data supports what many loan operations teams already experience. McKinsey has noted that banks continue to face challenges across loan operations, including processes, data management, technology platforms, and operating models. The firm also reported that most banks’ straight-through-processing rates in loan operations often remain below 50%, while some best-in-class institutions reach 80–90% in reconciliations

That gap matters because every exception, manual touchpoint, and workaround has to be absorbed somewhere. Often, it is absorbed by experienced employees who know how the deal is supposed to work because they have lived through the exceptions before.

The back office is absorbing complexity that may have been commercially necessary, but not fully operationally planned.

This becomes more important as lending markets expand. The IMF reported that the private credit market topped $2.1 trillion globally in assets and committed capital, with approximately three-quarters in the United States.

At the same time, competition is increasing. ION Analytics and Debtwire reported that competitive pressure was the single biggest factor shaping the broadly syndicated loan market for 30% of survey respondents reflecting the intensifying competition for mandates with private credit.

Growth and competition often create more complexity. Deals become more flexible, lender groups more varied, and amendments more frequent. The commercial side may see growth, while the operating side absorbs the accumulation.

This is where the distinction between chosen complexity and inherited complexity becomes important.

Chosen complexity is visible, priced, and planned for. A borrower may need flexibility. A lender group may require a tailored structure. A competitive deal may demand creativity.

Inherited complexity occurs when the people responsible for servicing the deal absorb the downstream effort without that cost being visible when the deal is structured.

Over time, those costs compound. Manual processes become embedded. Institutional knowledge becomes a dependency. Exceptions become part of the workflow. Growth becomes harder to scale without adding people, outsourcing, or investing in technology.

If a structure requires manual effort every time it is touched, that effort is part of the structure. And if that effort is recurring, it should be visible as part of the true cost of the deal.

Manual work is not always a failure. Sometimes it is the clearest signal that complexity was created intentionally — but its operational impact was never fully accounted for.

In Part 3, we’ll look at why amendments often feel more complex than origination — and what that reveals.

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