Greensill Capital (UK) Limited

Greensill Capital's collapse shows that a funding structure can cross lending, insurance, securitisation and fund-distribution boundaries faster than any one supervisor can assemble the whole risk picture.

Greensill Capital's failure did not show that paying suppliers early is inherently unsound. It showed what happens when a useful financing technique is expanded through opaque asset evidence, prospective receivables, concentrated counterparties, external insurance and market funding, while responsibility is divided among originators, fund managers, banks, auditors, regulators and public bodies. The central question is whether each gatekeeper could independently prove what it believed it was financing before confidence and liquidity disappeared.