Benefit Street Partners answers questions faster with Codex

At Benefit Street Partners, a credit-focused investment manager, answering an investment committee’s follow-up questions used to take days or weeks. Portfolio manager Anant Kumar says analysts can now turn a round of comments in a day with Codex, and often answer questions during the meeting itself. BSP is using these tools to add more review capacity and rigor to underwriting within the same timeframe, rather than to do more deals.

“I’ve gone from being just an analyst and a portfolio manager to being a developer as well now. I can build things.”

—Anant Kumar, Portfolio Manager, Benefit Street Partners

Building his own dashboards

To create a dashboard he could share with colleagues, Kumar used to need someone with software expertise to build a website and pull in the data. Now he builds his own tools, using AI to draft code and review it for errors.

His tracker uses public SEC filings from business development companies (BDCs) to compare how firms value the same loan. The team can see how its marks compare with other holders’ valuations.

Kumar built the tracker and used Codex for code review. The first version took a day. After adding features and refining the interface over subsequent weeks, he estimates total development time at 10–12 hours total.

Building a credit agreement analyzer

Kumar’s other tool analyzes credit agreements, which are often 300 pages or longer. Investors need to find clauses that could shift value away from lenders, a task that previously meant asking outside counsel to work through the agreement page by page. Kumar brought together memos from leading law firms on clauses and risks to watch for. He describes the analyzer as a “second brain within our organization.”

An uploaded credit agreement takes about 20 minutes to process into a first-pass analysis, followed by an hour or more of human review. BSP has refactored the tool with GPT‑6 Astra, and it is now live in the company-hosted portal.

—Anant Kumar, Portfolio Manager, Benefit Street Partners