LPC - Lending Lowdown Series

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.”