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Portfolio > Alternative Investments

Janus Henderson to Buy Victory Park in Private Credit Expansion

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What You Need to Know

  • The deal involves esoteric private financings related to anything from consumer debt to music royalties.
  • Victory Park has $6 billion of assets under management, while Janus has a $36 billion securitized asset business.
  • Janus is the latest in a string of large asset managers that have struck deals to expand in the fast growing, $1.7 trillion private credit market.

Janus Henderson Group Plc has agreed to buy Victory Park Capital Advisors in a bid to expand in the fast-growing private credit market, particularly asset-based finance.

Victory Park, which has $6 billion of assets under management, will add to Janus Henderson’s $36 billion securitized asset business, which is currently based on liquid products, according to a statement reviewed by Bloomberg News.

Through the transaction, the asset manager would get exposure to more esoteric private financings related to anything from consumer debt to music royalties.

“We have a very strong fixed income business, and a very strong public securitized business,” Ali Dibadj, Janus Henderson’s chief executive officer, said in an interview.

He said the acquisition will provide “much more differentiated access, as a firm, to some of these assets that are sitting behind public and private deals.”

A Changing Industry

Janus Henderson is the latest in a string of large asset managers that have struck deals to expand in the fast growing, $1.7 trillion private credit market.

That industry is much larger when accounting for asset-based finance, where private credit funds extend debt against streams of contractual cash flows that are tied to a defined pool of assets. That can be anything from real estate to auto loans and equipment leasing debt.

With competition increasing in direct lending, which is corporate debt tied typically to leveraged buyouts, investors are looking to other areas of private credit for yield.

Asset-based finance has attracted strong interest from private credit funds, which have taken advantage of the regional bank retrenchment. The debt’s investment-grade type structure is also an attractive selling point for insurance companies looking to diversify their allocations.

“We’ve been hearing about direct lending for years,” Dibadj said. “But clients are looking for more esoteric private credit. Asset-based finance is where the opportunity is.”.

The entire opportunity set for the private credit market could be as large as $40 trillion, Apollo Global Management Inc. has said. Blue Owl Capital Inc., which agreed in July to acquire a credit manager in the space, has estimated that the asset-based financing industry could represent a $7 trillion market today.

“Size does matter, as flippant as that sounds, especially in a global world,” said Victory Park CEO Richard Levy, who founded the firm in 2007 with senior partner Brendan Carroll.

“Our LPs have entrusted us over the last 20 years for executing in the asset-backed space, they’re also asking us to fill out different products for them,” Levy said in an interview.

Details on Janus

The purchase marks another step into the private credit market for Janus Henderson, which announced in May that it was acquiring the National Bank of Kuwait Group’s emerging markets private investments team, NBK Capital Partners.

Janus Henderson already has a track record in the liquid credit markets of securitized debt, namely via exchange-traded funds.

The firm reached $10 billion in assets in the biggest ETF tracking collateralized loan obligations, helping further tighten its grip on the quickly growing niche.

Aside from its AAA CLO ETF, the asset manager has another ETF that tracks CLOs with riskier credit ratings, and also has launched ETFs in other securitized markets such as mortgage-backed securities.

 

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