LPC - Lending Lowdown Series

Hosted by LSEG (London Stock Exchange Group)

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May 2026

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About the show

The Lending Lowdown provides credit market insights and views from the lending trenches. It recaps syndicated loan and private debt market events and thought leadership on trends and the latest deal activity.

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40 recent

May 11, 202614 min

Episode 39 | Private Credit – A Perspective on Current Market Conditions

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."

March 2, 202619 min

Episode 38 | The Role of NAV Loans and How They Fit in GPs Financial Tool Kit

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.

January 5, 202623 min

Episode 37 | 2025 Takeaways and Forward Look to 2026 US Direct Lending Market

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."

October 13, 202519 min

Episode 36 | Non-Sponsored Lending Opportunities in the European Mid-Market

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."

September 4, 202514 min

Episode 35 | Middle Market Direct Lending State of Play

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."

August 14, 202513 min

Episode 34 | Is the ‘golden age’ of private credit coming to an end?

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.”

July 22, 202517 min

Episode 33 | Asset based lending: Evolving taxonomy for direct lender vs bank arranged loans

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.”

May 7, 202517 min

Episode 32 | Current Dynamics in the Corporate Bond Market

Connor Fitzgerald, Portfolio Manager at Wellington Management, joins LSEG LPC’s CJ Doherty to discuss current conditions in the corporate bond market. "I think the Trump administration is in a challenging spot right now," Fitzgerald said. "While we tend to agree with some of the long term objectives that they're trying to achieve, we think the risk that the administration may be under-appreciated a little bit is that if we get too aggressive with some of our trading partners by way of tariffs that their response will be to liquidate the capital account."

April 23, 202524 min

Episode 31 | The intersection of private credit and insurance company capital

CJ Doherty sits down with David Ells, Partner and Portfolio Manager at Ares Management and Ryan Moreno, Partner and Co-head of Leveraged Finance at DLA Piper, to discuss the intersection of private credit and insurance company capital. “The first thing about being an insurance company is that everything is viewed through a lens of capital,” Ells said. “You have to allocate capital against everything that you own.”

March 26, 202515 min

Episode 30 | Understanding Debt Portability in Loan Agreements

Arek Maczka from Ropes & Gray joins host Chris Piccirillo to provide insight on debt portability provisions. Arek explains the concept of portability along with its purpose and benefits, outlines customary terms and conditions, and gives us his views on today’s market landscape and whether portable capital structures are here to stay. "Portability has become increasingly normalized over the past few years," Maczka said. "I agree that it does tend to ebb and flow, especially in the syndicated markets."