Public finance

The week goes to work products, not to deals.

Mandates are won on relationship depth. Market updates, pool RFQs, transaction RFPs and refunding analyses are not, and every one is built before a fee is earned. Starch produces the set from your own precedent and prior submissions, so those hours go back to the bankers.

Team previously at

What runs in the group

Watch the state and authority portals for new solicitations, qualify each against the group’s criteria, and open a draft response with the precedent already pulled.
Produce an issuer-specific market update on a schedule, priced off current levels and formatted the way the group sends it.
Run the refunding analysis from the outstanding series and the call schedule, with the savings math traceable to the official statement it came from.
Assemble a pitch book from prior submissions to comparable issuers, in the group’s own template.
Route the finished draft to the banker who owns it, then to compliance, and keep the audit trail.

Today’s solutions fall short

Selection is governed largely by things nobody controls: price, rotation policies, local preference. The return on all that bespoke work is low and unpredictable.

20% or lowerA common win rate on municipal pitches, even well-executed ones.

What you use today	What it does well	Where it falls short
Horizontal AI platforms for finance	Firm-wide search and Q&A across your documents	One product sold to hundreds of firms. It answers questions about the official statement; it does not produce the RFP response, and every group bidding against you runs the same thing.
General AI assistants	Fast drafting, summarisation and Q&A on public information	Cannot touch MNPI, deal pipelines or your compliance perimeter, and hold no memory of the materials and deals your group has already produced.
Market data and analytics platforms	Levels, issuer data and comparables	A data layer, not a workflow layer. Bankers still assemble the pitch by hand.
An internal proposal database	Consolidates prior submissions in one place	Maintained by hand, and hard to query across.
Junior bankers	Analysis and asset creation	Capacity-bound, and turnover erases institutional memory.

Nothing on the market automates the banker workflow itself.

Starch is built for this coverage group, on your own precedent.

No two public finance desks get the same build.

We work with more than one firm and we would rather say so. What we will not do is hand another group your build. The software is built against your precedent, your templates and your approval standards, and those are not things a competitor can license.

It also does not stand still. Every mandate leaves precedent behind and the next response starts from it. A platform hundreds of firms share is as good on day one as it will ever be for you. Yours keeps pulling away.

The curve has a start date. A group that begins now is building something the group that waits will spend years catching up to.

The week goes to work products, not to deals.

What runs in the group

What the group produces

Today’s solutions fall short

No two public finance desks get the same build.

See it on your own precedent