Inclusion criterion
A facility is included when the amount the borrower may draw is limited by a borrowing
base computed over eligible accounts receivable and/or eligible inventory at stated advance
rates, less reserves — irrespective of form. Revolving credit facilities, term loans and
FILO tranches all qualify when this structure governs availability, and the form is recorded
with each verdict. The label “asset-based” plays no role in classification: it is
neither necessary (many executed ABL agreements never use it) nor sufficient (it saturates
asset-backed securities material).
Corpus construction
The corpus is enumerated from SEC EDGAR full-text search over the structural term
"borrowing base", 2001 to present — EX-10.x is found directly
rather than through its parent form.
The anchor was audited with a supplementary sweep of six product-name phrases
(“asset-based lending”, “asset-based revolving credit facility”, …):
55,024 hits, 29,907 documents the structural term had not surfaced. Of these, 99.6% contain
no borrowing base of any kind, and the audit recovered one borrower the anchor had missed —
a measured miss rate of 1 company in 4,645.
Screening
A deterministic screen separates working-capital ABL from the other lending products that
compute a borrowing base — reserve-based oil & gas lending, commercial-real-estate pools,
fund-finance and BDC portfolio facilities, mortgage warehouses, securitisations — before any
language model is invoked. Across the full corpus, 80% of borrowing-base language is not
working-capital ABL. Documents the screen excluded:
Extraction and verification
Documents that survive the screen are read by a dedicated extraction agent, one agent per
document, against a targeted excerpt of the definitions article and availability covenant.
Every extracted value must be supported by a verbatim quotation from the filed document. Each
quotation is mechanically matched back against the source; claims whose quotations cannot be
located are discarded and counted rather than shown — fragmented matched
clause-by-clause in document order rather than as one contiguous span;
weak marks a short span that recurs within the document and
therefore fixes its value less precisely.
Sample and measurement notes
The term distributions count each borrower once.
Advance rates below Dilution reserves and permitted-reduction provisions parse as
percentages but are not advance rates; Administrative agents are consolidated by institution. Filing-name
variants are collapsed case-insensitively so one lender occupies one row; distinct
affiliates, such as a bank and its capital-finance subsidiary, are kept separate. The
eight most frequent agents arrange No time series is drawn yet. With the tier-one census complete —
a median of
Coverage limits
Private borrowers are invisible. Companies with no SEC filing
obligation cannot appear. Industry survey estimates place a large share of ABL — near
40% — in bilateral loans to private companies, outside the reach of any filings-based
method.2001 onward only. EDGAR full-text search does not index earlier
filings.Terms reflect the documents read. A company row leads with terms from
its strongest executed agreement; its other ABL filings are listed in the row’s
timeline and reflected once read. Amendments in unread filings are not yet shown.Detection identifies facilities. The registry says nothing about
credit quality, deterioration or performance.
Report a missing facility
If a borrower with an SEC-filed ABL facility does not appear in the registry — not merely
unread, but not identified at all — it can be submitted for screening. Submissions run
through the same pipeline before inclusion: deterministic screen, extraction, span
verification.
Compose report
Opens your mail client with the report prefilled.