Davis Polk partner and IP & Commercial Transactions practice co-head Frank Azzopardi was quoted in MLex discussing IP-backed lending.

The article highlighted that corporate value in the United States has become increasingly tied to intellectual property, rather than physical assets, and lenders have been looking beyond traditional forms of collateral to finance companies against patents, data, trade secrets and other intangible assets.

Discussing when this trend became popular, Frank said, “the real turning point, at least in my professional life, was the pandemic.”

The article noted how airlines turned to their frequent-flier programs for collateral during the pandemic. 

“The airlines were facing an existential crisis because people were not flying,” Frank explained. “What we did was we dropped them down in a bankruptcy-remote special purpose vehicle. The bonds were essentially issued against the loyalty company, and it raised billions and billions of much-needed liquidity for the airlines.”

“We’ve been iterating that structure since then in various contexts,” he continued. “Investors understand the structures. The rating agencies are very sophisticated, and also increasingly understanding the structures, and so it is becoming ripe for very attractive forms of financing, where the collateral is considered to be quite fortified and valuable.”

Noting that this concept is broadly applicable to other industries, Frank added, “it really is agnostic as to the type of IP, as long as the IP itself is critical to the ongoing ability of the company to conduct business.”

“As intangible assets grow, IP-backed lending gains traction in US,” MLex (June 26, 2026) 

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