The Fund Finance industry returned from the Miami conference to the most volatile two-week period since the financial crisis. With the coronavirus slowly spreading, the equities markets swinging wildly, Joe Biden surging in South Carolina and on Super Tuesday, Mike Bloomberg and Elizabeth Warren suspending their campaigns, and the Fed implementing an emergency 50 basis point rate cut (whew!), there has been a lot to keep up with. With this backdrop, I have closely reviewed our business metrics and connected with a number of industry leaders this week to try and identify any potential impacts for the fund finance markets. Below are my observations.
As with many other corporate or financial transactions between two or more parties, and especially given the relationship-nature of subscription finance lending, provisions in legal documentation often get replicated from one transaction to the next, including errors and inconsistencies as a result of the fast-paced world in which practitioners find themselves or, in some cases, a failure to connect the dots.
This is the first in a series of articles that will look at fund financing trends and issues in key offshore jurisdictions. In this article, we speak with Julia Keppe and Simon Felton at Ogier (Jersey) about what they are seeing in the Channel Islands and, more specifically, Jersey.
Mourant has published an article articulating overarching takeaways from the Global Fund Finance Symposium held last month.
Two in-depth reports recently published expanded on the remarkable capital-raising environment while pointing to the challenges posed by high valuations, the growing stock of committed but uninvested capital and the potential for a more difficult investment environment. Here’s what stood out to us from the McKinsey and Bain reports.
Scott Aleali of First Republic Bank this week published the first of a two-part article on LinkedIn titled “NAV Facilities: A Portfolio Management Solution for a PE Fund’s Sunset Years.”
Brickfield Consultants, the recruiting agency focused exclusively on fund finance, is seeking fund finance professionals for multiple roles.
Here's a look at what we're reading outside the four corners of fund finance.
Global private capital fundraising reached an all-time record $888.0 billion in 2019, according to PitchBook data summarized in its 2019 Annual Private Fund Strategies Report published last week. Record flows into private investment vehicles came in the context of high public equity valuations, a growing supply of negative-yielding debt around the world and signs of coordinated global deceleration in economic growth.
It is not unusual to hear the term “secondaries” in the fund finance world. It is thrown around conversationally and references arise frequently in market updates and panel discussions. For anyone not familiar with the term “secondaries,” we thought it would be useful to provide a concise introduction, including what secondaries are, why they are popular and how a secondary transaction is documented.