DebtBook rebrands as Monetary, releases AI platform

Monetary CEO Tyler Traudt said the company saw an opportunity to expand its services to a broader swath of the muni market.

DebtBook rebranded to Monetary on Monday, a move designed to underline the company’s evolution from Treasury management software to broader capital markets platform, then rolled out Monetary Markets, an artificial intelligence platform for financial professionals.

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The company already counts more than 20% of the nation’s top 1,000 municipal obligors as customers, it said. Monetary Markets was built in consultation with bankers and advisors and expands the company’s capabilities with a range of services that aim to foster closer collaboration across deal teams, Monetary said.

Markets caters to investment and commercial banks and municipal advisors.

An AI assistant, Marty, delivers details culled from public market data, proprietary firm intelligence, automated refunding analysis and debt structuring information, potentially saving deal teams hours of manual work, the company said in a release.

“We thought there was a very clear opportunity for us to deepen our impact in the market and help our customers achieve their outcomes … to add world-class software and purpose-built AI for their organizations, so we’re really quite excited about expanding,” Monetary CEO Tyler Traudt told The Bond Buyer.

“A big part of (public finance) is access to the market, access to capital. The capital markets platform, number one, is in our DNA. … But number two, it’s a big part of our customers’ life cycle,” said product director Brendan Mannion. “So building a tool specifically for bankers and advisors also better serves our customers and lets us build this infrastructure for the entire industry, beginning to end.”

The platform gathers debt schedules, allocations, refunding lineage, private placements, client events and firms’ own deal documents, memos and proprietary overlays.

It includes a complete structuring engine tailored to the client and the market, and its analysis connects to full municipal reference data, yield curves, Treasuries, State and Local Government Series securities, Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association/Secured Overnight Financing Rate, secondary trades, primary comps and offering documents, Monetary said.

The software analyzes “the fundamental Treasury data, their loan portfolio, debt portfolio, their cash trends, and also their investment holdings and policies; all of this information can be instantly accessed — no back and forth — and in a really confident way,” Traudt said.

But with AI, confidence is not always the same as accuracy. So Traudt stressed that none of the information stored in the application is “generated by AI.”

“It is a deterministic system of record. That is what we are built on. That is our foundation,” he said. “Artificial intelligence, which is a probabilistic engine, should utilize the deterministic engine, which is all of our core business logic, our financial calculations, our data structure — those things must work together.”

“It is auditable, it is traceable,” Mannion said. “I can see exactly what Marty’s doing.”

Marty is built so users can input plain-language questions about cash positions, callable bonds and refunding savings. It then proposes workflows.

But the system is meant to keep humans in the loop, Monetary said in the release: “Every answer traces back to its source. The user reviews and approves.”

“As a former investment banker and municipal advisor, much of my advice was reliant on the accuracy of the financial information that I received,” Traudt said. “We are blessed to help organizations organize that data, surface that data, and then ultimately (take) action off of it.”