This is the first article in a four-part series on IP-backed finance, from the innovator’s side: what companies and their IP advisers can do to prepare their assets for financing.
In April 2026 the EUIPO published a foundational report on IP-backed finance: how European companies could use their intellectual property to raise credit and capital, and why today they mostly cannot. It is a long document, 131 pages, written for policymakers and financial institutions. It deserves a wider readership than that.
The figures in the report show why every IP-rich company should pay attention. It estimates the EU's SME credit gap at up to EUR 365 billion a year, and the share attributable to IP-rich firms at EUR 70-150 billion a year. With the right infrastructure for disclosure, valuation and risk-sharing, it expects IP-backed instruments could mobilise EUR 30-120 billion a year in new financing. IP-intensive industries already generate around 48% of EU GDP. The timing matters too: the Savings and Investment Union is being designed now, and the report's central argument is that freed capital "flows to where it can be assessed, priced and deployed with confidence." If IP cannot be assessed, the capital will go elsewhere.
The report maps 18 possible actions across three pillars and orders the most actionable into five priorities: make IP visible, assign it a credible value, leverage that value into lending, build the evidence base, and reinforce coordination. Most of these are jobs for regulators, banks and IP offices, and some will take years.
But every one of them also asks something of the companies that own the IP and of the lawyers who advise them. That side of the story is what this series is about. Over four posts we will read the report from the innovator's chair:
- The disclosure paradox (this post): why the first priority collides with the nature of the asset.
- The vicious circle: what a lender actually needs to know about an IP asset, and which part of that you control.
- Blockchain in IP finance: what the report gets right about tokenisation, and what it leaves out.
- Readiness: a practical checklist for being financeable when the instruments arrive.
Priority 1 runs into a wall
The report's first priority is to make IP visible. "Before IP can be used for financing, it must be visible, structured and understandable by financial actors." The starting point is low. Citing earlier EUIPO survey data, the report notes that only 13% of IP right owners have ever tried to obtain financing through their IP assets, and a large majority have never had a professional valuation.
Part of the reason is accounting. IAS 38, the international accounting standard for intangible assets, lets a company show the IP it develops itself as an asset only in narrow cases. Most of that work is booked as an expense, so it never appears on the balance sheet, however valuable it is. The report proposes a voluntary disclosure framework to fill that gap. Its starting point would be the IP Scan, an IP check-up already available to small businesses through the SME Fund, the EUIPO's grant scheme for EU-based SMEs: an expert designated by the national IP office reviews the company's business and its IP, and recommends a strategy, with most of the cost reimbursed. The report would turn it into a financing-oriented disclosure tool covering "both registered IP rights and other relevant intangibles."
The other reason matters most for IP counsel. The report describes innovation finance as a market with severe information asymmetry: investors cannot tell good projects from weak ones, so they price everything as average. Telling them more does not work well, because "innovative ideas can be imitated" and "companies hesitate to share details due to competitive risks, weakening the credibility of their signals." Elsewhere it notes that disclosure about intangibles "may undermine the firm's competitive position" and that fear of spillovers to competitors keeps firms quiet.
In other words, the first step towards IP-backed finance asks innovators to do the one thing their IP strategy tells them not to do.
Why it bites hardest on unregistered IP
For registered rights the tension is mild. A granted patent is already public, and the register is the evidence. A lender can look it up.
The problem is everything that is not registered, which in many technology companies is most of the value: source code, process know-how, formulations, training data and models, design files, lab records. Here, secrecy is not a preference. Under the EU Trade Secrets Directive (2016/943), information is protected as a trade secret only if it has been subject to reasonable steps to keep it secret. Each disclosure to a lender, a valuer or an investor is a small erosion of the very thing that makes the asset valuable and protectable.
NDAs help, but an NDA governs how the other side behaves with your information; it does not record what that information was, or when you had it. And a lender asked to accept "we have valuable know-how, trust us" will do what the report says lenders do today: apply a heavy haircut, or leave the asset out altogether.
So the innovator is stuck between two bad options. Disclose, and weaken the asset. Stay quiet, and the asset does not count.
Separate the proof from the content
There is a third option, resting on a simple piece of cryptography. A fingerprint (hash) of a file identifies that exact file. Anyone holding the file can recompute it and check it matches; nobody holding only the fingerprint can work back to the file.
Fix that fingerprint in time with an independent, verifiable timestamp, and you have a sealed envelope with a postmark nobody can forge. It proves that a specific piece of work existed on a specific date and has not changed since, while revealing nothing about its content. Whoever you later allow to open it can check for themselves that it is what you certified.
For IP-backed finance this changes the disclosure step. A company can show a lender a structured inventory of its unregistered assets, each with a certified date and an integrity proof, without handing over a line of the underlying work. When a valuer or the lender's counsel needs to go deeper, the material can be opened to them alone, with a record of who saw what.
How Bernstein does it
This is what Bernstein has done since 2016. It is an Innovation Evidence Platform: it produces proof of existence, ownership and integrity for digital assets without exposing their content.
- Files are encrypted in your browser before they leave your device. Only the fingerprint is used for certification. Bernstein cannot read your content, which is why the evidence can cover your most sensitive material.
- The fingerprint is anchored to the Bitcoin blockchain, to EU qualified timestamps under eIDAS, and to a China timestamp authority. For European counsel, the eIDAS anchor carries a legal presumption: under Article 41(2) of the eIDAS Regulation, a qualified electronic timestamp enjoys a presumption of the accuracy of its date and time and of the integrity of the data it is bound to.
- Every certification produces a certificate anyone can verify independently, without Bernstein. A lender does not have to trust us, or you.
- The certified files themselves are kept, encrypted and versioned. A fingerprint is only useful if you can still produce the exact file it was made from, byte for byte. Over years or decades that is harder than it sounds: files get migrated between systems and re-saved, and some software silently rewrites a PDF's metadata just by opening it. Change a single byte and the file no longer matches its proof. Bernstein stores the originals exactly as certified, so they are still there, unaltered, when the proof has to be checked.
- Revisions are immutable and dated, so the record shows how the work developed, not only that it existed.
- Sharing is controlled and logged: time-limited links, one-time passwords, contract acceptance before access, and hash-chained access logs. The same record that supports a valuation also documents the reasonable steps you took to keep the information secret.
What Bernstein does not do is value your IP or decide whether a bank will lend against it. Those remain the work of valuers, lenders and the policy changes the report describes. What it does is remove the reason to stay invisible: you can make an asset legible to a financial counterparty without giving it away.
Disclose the proof, not the secret
The EUIPO is right that IP must become visible before it can be financed. For unregistered IP, the practical way to get there is not more disclosure of content but better disclosure of evidence: what exists, since when, held by whom, and unchanged. That is information a lender can use and a competitor cannot.
In Part 2, we move to the lender's side of the table. Even when IP is visible, the report finds that banks still discount it heavily, because of a vicious circle in which no transactions means no data, and no data means no transactions. We look at what a lender actually needs to know about a single IP asset, and which part of that answer only the owner can supply.
If you want to see how a certified, verifiable record works in practice, you can find out more at bernstein.io.
Source: EUIPO, IP-backed Finance (April 2026): Executive Summary; section 2.1.1 (information asymmetry); section 2.2.2 (identification of intangibles, IAS 38); section 4.1 (Priority 1: make IP visible). Bernstein provides evidence, not legal advice, and does not replace patents, trademarks or contracts.
