LPC - Lending Lowdown Series

In this discussion, Rene Michau, Global Head of Digital Assets, and Dr. Alaa Alaabed, Director-Group Islamic FM Products at Standard Chartered, join CJ Doherty to explore where digital financial infrastructure is heading and how Islamic finance can be embedded into trusted digital rails to broaden participation, improve execution, and unlock new opportunities for cross-border business. "The challenge with all tokenisation at the moment is the scaling of the underlying infrastructure,” said Rene Michau. “We need Islamic banks to be able to provide custody for these assets, to be able to provide execution, to allow clients to access them, and to allow those to move to venues for distribution, and for all of that to be working together."

In this discussion, Kyle McGrady, Senior Principal and Head of Client & Partner Solutions at Eagle Point Credit Management, joins LSEG LPC's CJ Doherty to share insights on Portfolio Debt Securities, including what they are, how they fit within portfolio construction and approaches to risk management. "To date no portfolio debt security investment has experienced a credit loss,” said McGrady. "To our knowledge, we’ve had about 1.4% of our portfolio that has covenant breaches.”

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."

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.

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."