Don’t overlook your intangibles as collateral for financing

Bankers might have laughed at you if you suggested your intellectual property and other intangibles could be the basis for loans or financing in the past.  Lindsay Moore, CEO of KLM (consulting) reminds us it wasn’t that long ago that “there was only one class of assets to leverage in enterprise strategy – the traditional tangible and fi­nancial assets of plant, property, equip­ment and cash.”

Now, business leaders may be able to take new approaches.  As an alternative to IP licensing, Lindsay suggests securitization finance, “a type of asset-backed le­verage that pools income streams from licensing arrangements to form a finan­cial instrument that can be sold in the capital markets.”

The main benefit to securitization is that title to IP rights is not transferred, while the IP is generating an income stream. Read a more complete analysis here.