LPC - Lending Lowdown Series

CJ Doherty speaks with Greg Ciesielski, Head of Credit Secondaries at HarbourVest Partners, about the growth of private credit secondaries, what’s driving activity, sources of supply, investment strategies and the outlook for opportunities in the market. "The market's grown quite rapidly. It's been doubling year over year over the last four years," said Greg Ciesielski. Discussing the role of secondaries within private credit, he added: "So while the performance has actually been quite strong, the duration of the underlying funds has been very long, and that's led to the requirement to have a liquidity solution for an illiquid market.”

In this discussion, Rene Michau, Global Head of Digital Assets, and Dr. Alaa Alaabed, Director-Group Islamic FM Products at Standard Chartered, join CJ Doherty to explore where digital financial infrastructure is heading and how Islamic finance can be embedded into trusted digital rails to broaden participation, improve execution, and unlock new opportunities for cross-border business. "The challenge with all tokenisation at the moment is the scaling of the underlying infrastructure,” said Rene Michau. “We need Islamic banks to be able to provide custody for these assets, to be able to provide execution, to allow clients to access them, and to allow those to move to venues for distribution, and for all of that to be working together."

In this discussion, Kyle McGrady, Senior Principal and Head of Client & Partner Solutions at Eagle Point Credit Management, joins LSEG LPC's CJ Doherty to share insights on Portfolio Debt Securities, including what they are, how they fit within portfolio construction and approaches to risk management. "To date no portfolio debt security investment has experienced a credit loss,” said McGrady. "To our knowledge, we’ve had about 1.4% of our portfolio that has covenant breaches.”

LSEG LPC’s CJ Doherty is joined by David Fann, Partner and Head of Capital Formation at VSS Capital Partners to discuss the state of the private credit market and structured capital as a financing option today. "Artificial intelligence is for real. And like any of these exogenous disruptions that have occurred, hard to figure out, truly potentially impactful in ways that none of us had ever contemplated," Fann said. "The noise around AI is a recent phenomenon. I would say, while it's been around for over 40 years. I remember taking AI class, artificial intelligence classes back in college, way back in the 80s."

LSEG LPC’s CJ Doherty sits down with Aryeh Landsberg, Managing Director, Investments at 17Capital and Ryan Moreno, Partner and Co-Head of Private Credit and Fund Finance at DLA Piper, to discuss NAV loans made to private equity funds, how GPs deploy this product and how it fits in their financial tool kit. "NAV can be a useful tool to help manage remaining capital needs, maintain a balance between remaining uncalled capital from their LPs for additional uses such as accretive M&A opportunities but also for fund level expenses," said Landsberg. "Banks, historically, had been the provider of the NAV loan product, more in a kind of fashion where they would do it as an accommodation for one of their larger sponsor clients," Moreno said.

Garrett Stephen, Senior Managing Director, Co-Head of Origination at Napier Park Global Capital talks to CJ Doherty, Director of Analysis at LSEG LPC, about private credit in 2025 and what is in store for 2026. "I'd say on the AI side, it's really a big focus at the business level for us on making sure that we're implementing AI more broadly within our work streams to stay ahead of the curve,” Stephen said. "If you have a large workforce and maybe not every individual within that workforce is productive, and you can utilize technology to make your core employees more productive, that potentially could cause some of that workforce to decline in those mature or declining businesses."

Chris Rust, Co-Head of European Private Credit at investment manager Ninety One join CJ Doherty, Director of Analysis at LSEG LPC, to discuss non-sponsored lending opportunities in the European middle market. "There certainly are a lot of misconceptions about the non-sponsored lending strategy. One of them is that non-sponsored borrowers are inherently riskier than sponsored borrowers," Rust said. "Oftentimes there's a view that they're smaller businesses and therefore they're also less credit worthy, not as good credits. And in general, there is in some parts of the market a view, simply put, that it is a riskier or high-risk strategy."

Loan market veteran Tom Newberry, Chief Credit Officer & Executive Chairman of direct lending at Sound Point Capital Management sits down with CJ Doherty, Director of Analysis at LSEG LPC to discuss the US middle market direct lending landscape, providing insight on deal flow, pricing, fundraising and portfolio company performance. "Direct lending deal volumes were down somewhere between 10% and 40% in the first half of 2025," Newberry said. "This obviously contrasts fairly dramatically with what everyone expected to be a banner year for acquisition activity."

Michael Gross, co-founder and co-Chief Executive Officer of SLR Capital Partners, joins CJ Doherty to share his thoughts on private credit and BDCs, including whether the ‘golden age’ of private credit is coming to an end. “The benefits of private credit obviously is speed to market, flexible structuring,” Gross said. “I do think you will see an increased level of defaults over the next couple of years in traditional private credit lending portfolios.”

LSEG LPC's Maria Dikeos talks with Barry Bobrow, Head of Credit Markets for Regions Business Capital and founder and chairman of Asset Based Capital, a leading conference on asset based lending, about similarities and differences of the asset based loan arranged in the bank loan market vs the direct lending market. “If done what I would call the right way,” Bobrow said, “asset based loans have a very low loss rate, a high recovery rate, relative to the broader category of leveraged lending.”