Terms.com.au

Seven years is a long time to remember where you put something 💭 It is roughly the lifespan of a Labrador, or 2 federal elections, or the time it takes a newborn to develop strong opinions about vegetables. It's also longer than most people's memory (unless you have a photographic one, in which case well done!) But - it's now the amount of time that you need to keep records under Australia's AML/CTF regime, which as of 1 July applies to a great many businesses that were happily ignoring it a fortnight ago. Seven years from now, someone may ask you to produce the identity verification you ran on a borrower this week. Or the document that satisfied a condition precedent. Or the reason you approved a deal on a Tuesday afternoon when everyone was tired and the numbers looked fine. You will not remember. Nobody remembers. That is the entire point of writing things down. The good news is that keeping a complete, immutable record of every document, request and decision is no longer a manual chore that eats an analyst's week (if you're an analyst, Terms can help you do this quickly). It is a solved problem and requires a platform that was actually built for the job, rather than a shared drive with optimistic folder names. Your future self will thank you 🙏 Your auditor definitely will 😍 Have a good weekend! #KnowYourTerms #DueDiligence #AML #KYC #PrivateCredit

The leading private credit funds are onboard with the changes 🚀

Real estate makes up roughly half of Australia's A$200 billion non-bank lending market. ASIC has now named property development as particularly exposed. Rising debt servicing costs. Build cost escalation. Project delays. Soft presales. Unsold stock. Weaker refinancing conditions. Every one of those is a question your DD process covered (or not). The market is heading into its first period of genuine credit differentiation. Basically: the funds that underwrote properly are about to look very different from the funds that did not. That difference will not show up in a pitch deck. It will show up in the file. Can you produce the QS report that supported the drawdown? The presale evidence at approval? Whether the valuation was 'as is' or 'as if complete'? The date the condition precedent was satisfied, and by whom? If the answer involves opening four systems and calling a colleague, that is your gap. ASIC's language was blunt. These obligations cannot be outsourced. Tracking due diligence, file storage and security of your documents is the defence and preventative measure. Implement it now, see the results. 📩 harvey@terms.com.au #KnowYourTerms #DueDiligence #CRE #PropertyDevelopment #StructuredLending #AssetBacked

On 1 July, roughly 80,000 Australian businesses became reporting entities. A lot of them still do not know it. Australia's Tranche 2 AML/CTF reforms commenced on 1 July 2026. The regime now captures lawyers, accountants, conveyancers, real estate professionals and property developers for the first time since it began in 2006. If you provide a designated service, you are in scope. The obligation attaches to the activity, not the job title. What it means in practice: 👉 Enrol with AUSTRAC by 29 July 2026. That is 17 days away. 👉 Build an AML/CTF program with a named compliance officer. 👉 Run customer due diligence before you provide the service, not after. 👉 Screen for sanctions and politically exposed persons. 👉 File suspicious matter reports. 👉 Keep records for seven years. Civil penalties reach up to A$31.3 million per contravention for a corporation! Here is the part that matters for anyone in structured lending. Seven-year record-keeping is not a filing cabinet problem. It is an infrastructure problem. If your borrower documents, identity checks and decision history live across inboxes, spreadsheets and someone's desktop, you do not have a record. You have a scavenger hunt. Terms keeps every document, every request and every decision in one place, with a full audit trail attached to the deal. Not because it is a nice feature. Because its a requirement for the future of lending in Australia. 📩 harvey@terms.com.au #KnowYourTerms #DueDiligence #AML #KYC #StructuredLending

Weekend reading. Grab a coffee! There is a comfortable myth doing the rounds that AI will eventually do your due diligence for you. It will not. Uptake of generative AI across Australian finance has been slow and cautious. The reasons given are privacy, data security, the regulatory environment, integration and skills shortages. All legitimate. But the caution is masking a more useful question. The question is not whether AI can replace your credit judgement. It cannot and it should not. A general purpose model does not know your fund's risk appetite. It has never sat in your investment committee and it can’t tell you whether a presale contract is soft, or whether a builder is about to walk. The question is: what AI should actually be doing? The monotonous work: Reading the same document type for the 100th time. Checking whether a QS report is missing. Flagging that a condition precedent has not been satisfied. Chasing the borrower for the thing they said they sent on Tuesday. That is not judgement. That is admin and admin is where deals quietly die. The funds that win the next decade will not be the ones who replaced their analysts with a chatbot. They will be the ones who gave their analysts infrastructure built for the job, took the mechanical work off their desks and let them spend their time on the parts that actually require a human brain - the crtical thinking. Human in the loop. Purpose-built for the fund's workflow. Backed by your own data, not the open internet. That is the play. #KnowYourTerms #DueDiligence #AI #StructuredLending

Who doesn't love singing in the shower? We will come back to that. The gap between the best-run funds and the rest is about to get a lot more visible. PwC's 2026 Global Private Credit Survey found that while more than 80% of portfolio managers expect increased allocations, the asset class has reached an inflection point. The gap between stronger and weaker portfolios is becoming more visible (whether or not you wear glasses). Akin to singing in the shower, it is great, until someone actually listens. That's ASIC knocking on your door. Winning managers will be those who can demonstrate better underwriting, portfolio management and governance to deliver risk-adjusted returns through a cycle. ASIC agrees (and wants you to continue singing). Better practice means detailed due diligence, internal credit ratings with regular reviews and proactive monitoring supported by documented default management protocols. The kind we built into Terms. Sources: PwC Global Private Credit Survey (May 2026), ASIC REP 820, Lexology Private Credit Surveillance Summary. #KnowYourTerms #DueDiligence #Governance #StructuredLending

A$200 billion. That's where the Australian private credit market sits today. Australian private capital AUM has nearly tripled over the past decade, reaching approximately A$200 billion, as non-bank lenders step in to meet the financing needs left unmet by traditional banks. Globally, the market sits at A$5.4 trillion across 3,375 managers and is forecast to reach A$7.8 trillion by 2029. The capital is there. The deals are there. But managers with dry powder are now being more selective about the deals they choose to finance and the window to move first on a deal is narrowing. In that environment, the funds that move fastest through DD without compromising rigour are the ones that win. That speed comes from process and infrastructure, not headcount. Terms is the platform built to give Australian lending teams that edge. Sources: Jones Day Private Credit Laws and Regulations Australia (2026), Alvarez and Marsal Australian Private Credit Report and EY-Parthenon Annual Australian Private Debt Market Overview (2026) #KnowYourTerms #DueDiligence #PrivateCredit #StructuredLending

ASIC reviewed 28 funds managing $29.8 billion. Here's what they found. Poor documentation of credit decisions. Inconsistent definitions of default. Limited credit assessments with no internal scoring and across the board, inadequate (non-existent) audit trails. ASIC's REP 820 didn't pull punches. "Poor private credit practices" is now a named enforcement priority for 2026. Chair Sarah Court has stated the regulator "won't hesitate to take enforcement action." Four interim stop orders have already been issued against funds this financial year alone. Due diligence is no longer a 'nice-to-get-right.' It is a regulatory obligation and the regulator is now on-site, requesting documents and checking your records. Terms.com.au is working with funds to build DD processes that are rigorous and deal specific, repeatable and fully auditable. An immutable audit trail is not a bonus feature. In today's environment it is the baseline. 🌐 terms.com.au Sources: ASIC REP 820 (November 2025) and Clayton Utz Private Credit Escalation Report (June 2026), Money Management FY25-26 Review (July 2026) #KnowYourTerms #DueDiligence #ASIC #StructuredLending

We built Terms.com.au because we kept hearing the same conversation. "We just use an Excel spreadsheet." "It's all in the email chain." "We've got a shared drive for that." "It's in my head anyway." Private credit DD in Australia is complex, high-stakes and genuinely demanding work. The tools being used to manage it? None that keep up with the pace required. If you originate with precision and speed, you should fly through DD with ease. Here's the reality. There is more dry powder in the Australian private credit market than ever before. Capital is ready. Deals are there. But funds are competing to the last minute to get DD done and get money out the door. In that environment, your ability to complete DD faster than a competitor is not a "nice-to-have." It is the difference between funding a deal and watching someone else do it. Australia is one of the most rigorous financial markets in the world and that scrutiny is earned. But there is a difference between rigour and inertia and a lot of what we heard when we started building was inertia dressed up as scrutiny. So we built something purpose-specific. Not another generic document tool. Not a project management platform with a finance face-lift. A platform built around how private credit and structured lending actually works. Your speed to fund a deal is your edge. We built the infrastructure to support it. 📩 harvey@terms.com.au 🌐 terms.com.au #KnowYourTerms #PrivateCredit #DueDiligence #Workflow

Too many tools. Not enough clarity. Most private credit and CRE lending teams are running their DD process across multiple platforms - with no single source of truth and no audit trail. The result is missed documents, duplicated effort, data mismatch and deals that take longer than they should. 📩 harvey@terms.com.au 🌐 terms.com.au #KnowYourTerms #PrivateCredit #DueDiligence #ChaosToClarity