A credit committee reviewing an IP-backed loan asks four questions in a fixed order: who is the borrower and what do they own, do they hold clean title to it, what is it worth, and — if the loan sours — could we sell the asset to recover the debt. Most businesses seeking to borrow against their intangible assets arrive with a valuation and little else. That answers one of the four questions; the other three decide whether the loan happens.
The IP collateral pack for lenders answers all four in a single document, in the order a bank reads them. It is the assembled lender-facing evidence bundle that sits between a formal intellectual property audit and a credit decision — bank-specific formatting of an intangible-asset audit into a bundle a committee can act on without commissioning its own workstream.
A valuation tells a lender what an asset might be worth. A collateral pack tells them whether they can lend against it — proving ownership, encumbrance status, evidence quality and realisability alongside the number. That difference is the difference between a polite decline and a term sheet.
An IP collateral pack is a structured, dated export a borrower hands to a bank's credit committee when seeking IP-backed lending. It bundles the borrower's intangible assets with ownership and title evidence, per-asset valuation, evidence grading, a collateral-suitability rating and a financials summary — the full case for treating intangible collateral as security.
It is deliberately not a valuation report. A valuation answers "what is this worth"; a collateral pack answers the credit committee's real question: "can we lend against this, how much, and how safely?" It is honest about its limits, too — the valuation inside it is an IVS 210-aligned indicative figure, not a formal RICS Red Book opinion, and it says so.
The structure of the pack mirrors how a lender triages a case. Each section maps to a question the committee has to close out before it can approve a facility:
Cash flow is a lender's primary source of repayment; collateral is the fallback. That is why a serious pack pairs the asset case with a financials summary and flags the debt-service position — the DSCR benchmark most lenders work to sits around 1.25 times. An asset case with no serviceability story is only half an answer.
The Opagio Collateral Pack assembles twelve sections, ordered for a credit reader rather than for an accountant. The evidence core — register through realisability — is where the defensible material lives; the financials bridge and security mechanics frame it for the lender.
| # | Section | What it establishes |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Executive summary | Portfolio value, eligible-asset count, suitability spread, as-at date |
| 2 | Borrower profile | Company, sector, entity and register metadata |
| 3 | Asset register | Itemised intangibles, type, eligibility, value and method |
| 4 | Ownership & title | Per-asset chain of title evidence coverage |
| 5 | Encumbrance & charge | Existing-charge status, to corroborate at Companies House |
| 6 | Per-asset valuation | Fair value, method and basis, with limiting conditions |
| 7 | Evidence grading (L0–L4) | Bank-readiness level and completeness per asset |
| 8 | Collateral suitability (RAG) | The centrepiece — a Red/Amber/Green verdict per asset |
| 9 | Realisation | How readily each asset could be sold on enforcement |
| 10 | Financials summary | Revenue, EBITDA and normalised EBITDA, with basis and date |
| 11 | Debt serviceability | The DSCR position, framed against facility terms |
| 12 | Security & methodology | UK charge mechanics, methods used, limiting conditions |
Sections three through nine are the core a lender cannot easily assemble itself. They draw directly from the intangible-asset register built during discovery, and each carries a "what to add to strengthen this" prompt where the evidence is thin — exactly where the work of getting to bankable begins.
Two ideas do the heavy lifting inside the pack, and both are result-level judgements a credit reader can act on without the machinery behind them.
The first is the evidence ladder, which grades each asset from L0 to L4: Unidentified, Identified, Title-confirmed, Diligence-ready, and Bank-ready. An asset at L4 has the ownership, encumbrance and enforceability evidence a lender expects; an asset at L1 is a claim with nothing behind it. The ladder turns "we own some IP" into a precise statement of how much of the portfolio is genuinely lendable today.
The second is the collateral-suitability rating — a per-asset Red/Amber/Green verdict built from three axes a lender cares about:
Collateral suitability is the assessment of whether an asset is actually usable as security — distinct from what it is worth. A high-value asset that cannot be separated from the operating business, or whose title is contested, is poor collateral however large the valuation. The rating is a weakest-link verdict: one fatal flaw is never averaged away by strength elsewhere.
Amber and Red assets are not failures — they are a to-do list. Each carries the specific evidence a borrower needs to add to move an asset toward Green, which is where an intangible-asset programme stops being a report and becomes a plan.
The Collateral Pack is one step in a deliberate progression, priced so that a business can find out whether IP-backed borrowing is realistic before committing to the full engagement.
| Stage | What it does | Price |
|---|---|---|
| IP Discovery | Free identification of your intangible assets — top of the funnel | Free |
| IP Audit | The full audit: identification, valuation and evidence grading | £745+VAT early-bird / £995+VAT standard |
| Collateral Pack | Bank-specific assembly of the audit into a lender-ready bundle | £295+VAT per pack |
| Opagio Intangibles | Ongoing re-scoring, evidence maintenance and full valuation | Subscription (Starter and above) |
The first Collateral Pack is included with the IP Audit, so a borrower who commissions the audit already has a lender-ready bundle for their primary bank. Additional bank-specific packs — lenders format and weight collateral differently — are £295+VAT each.
A scale-up preparing to approach two lenders starts with the free IP Discovery to confirm it has registrable assets, commissions the IP Audit at the early-bird rate, and receives its first Collateral Pack in the price. When it decides to approach a second bank with a different collateral appetite, it generates a second pack for £295. The evidence work is done once; each pack reformats it for the reader.
A collateral pack is stamped "as at" a date, and that date matters. A suitability rating decays as evidence ages, charges are registered or discharged, and markets move. A pack that was accurate in January may misstate the position by the time a slower credit process reaches committee.
Do not treat a collateral pack as a permanent artefact. Title can change, a new charge can be registered at Companies House, and realisability shifts with an asset's market. A pack more than roughly ninety days old should be re-scored before it goes in front of a lender — a stale pack invites a diligence question you cannot answer on the spot.
Keeping the pack current is why the lending line connects to a subscription. Ongoing re-scoring and evidence maintenance run inside Opagio Intangibles, which holds the register, tracks evidence as it is added, and regenerates the pack against live data rather than a snapshot. The one-off pack gets a borrower to a lender; the subscription keeps them there.
If you are weighing IP-backed borrowing against a further equity round, the honest first step is to find out what you can actually pledge. Start with the IP Audit, which grades your assets and produces your first lender-ready pack; the IP Audit waitlist is the entry point. To see how the register, valuation and suitability rating work against your own data first, book a demo of Opagio Intangibles.
The businesses that borrow well against their intangibles are rarely the ones with the most impressive valuations. They are the ones who arrive with ownership proved, encumbrances checked and realisability assessed — the ones who did the evidence work before the credit committee asked for it.
Tony Hillier is co-founder of Opagio. He holds an MA from Balliol College, Oxford and an MBA with distinction. Tony held executive board positions at NM Rothschild & Sons and GEC Finance, and a non-executive directorship at Financial Security Assurance in New York, where he specialised in structured finance, asset-backed securities and cross-border transactions.
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