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The ascendance of private credit into mainstream finance has reached its logical endpoint: a courthouse in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina.
Barings, the asset manager housed within insurer MassMutual, has sued an upstart private credit platform, Corinthia Global Management, over charges the latter improperly poached several debt investors at Barings.
Such employment disputes between firms are hardly unusual in finance. And Corinthia is just the latest built to take advantage of the private credit boom. The former Barings team is based in the Tar Heel State hence the lawsuit’s venue.
The ironic quirk, however, is that this newcomer is backed by Japan’s Nomura, a traditional bank which private credit has been designed to displace.
The big financing packages that typically back billion-dollar leveraged buyouts are known as “broadly syndicated loans”. Traditional deposit-taking banks originate these leveraged loans and parcel them out to specialist funds including so-called collateralised loan obligations. It historically has been a standardised if lucrative product.
So-called direct lending deals match a specialist fund that bilaterally offers corporate loans that are typically held to maturity. This is not a new structure. But historically direct lending was directed at small and mid-sized companies with ebitda of less than $100mn.
Traditional private equity firms in the past five years have however raised mega private credit funds that can go head-to-head with the bank-originated syndicated loans extended to companies of in effect any size. Data shows that this direct lending market now has $800bn of assets under management, compared to about $1.4tn of syndicated loans outstanding.
When traditional financial institutions seized up amid monetary tightening and Silicon Valley Bank’s implosion in 2023, private credit funds were the only game in town to fund most deals. Blackstone’s Steve Schwarzman noted last year that lending at 12 per cent on a senior secured basis was easy money.
Traditional bank lending, however, retains advantages. Deposits remain the lowest cost of funds possible. Banks have enormous depth of relationships and debt underwriting experience.
Still, rather than simply competing head-to-head with private credit, banks have made the calculation that they must embrace the new world and form their own copycats. Private credit deals, in addition to generating interest income, also charge management fees to limited partners. The deals are often complex and companies increasingly want sophisticated financing solutions.
Each side, amid ongoing encroachments, will have to decide how much to co-operate and how much to compete. Banks, for example, already provide “back” leverage to private credit funds to juice their firepower. Providing talent in a midnight raid, however, might be a bridge too far.
