Are we at peak finance?

Message from Octus: The definitive 2025 credit market rankings: Who shaped the market and where is it headed?

2025 rewrote the playbook for credit markets. Private credit solidified its dominance. CLO issuance hit record levels despite macro headwinds. And restructuring activity reached an all-time high as Chapter 11 filings surged.

Octus' FY'25 League Tables offer a sharp look at direct lending, CLO, and restructuring activity across the Americas, EMEA, and APAC — your essential guide to navigating where the real action is and which firms are dominating the game.

Here is what you’ll find in the full reports:

• Direct Lending & Private Credit: Rankings of top lenders and legal advisors by deal count, debt volume, and sector concentration

• CLO: Global market rankings on CLO managers, arrangers, and legal counsel, featuring AUM comparisons, AAA spreads, and BWIC data.

• Restructuring: Comprehensive rankings of legal, financial, and banking advisors across in- and out-of-court mandates.

The firms that led in 2025 understood the market before it moved. Make sure you're ahead of what's coming in 2026.

Welcome back!

We’re going to talk about whether hiring in finance may have peaked, and zone in on consolidation in Private Credit and the slow bleed in Middle Market Private Equity.

I’ve been kicking the can on this piece for a while, but it’s super timely, because there was a Forbes piece a couple weeks back that really beat up on the so-called “Zombie” PE funds.

With the recent deal for CVC to buy Marathon, there’s a clear push for finance being a scale game. Last month, I talked about the role that massive credit shops are able to play in AI data center buildouts. Many buyside managers need to focus on scaling up so they can compete properly for the biggest deals.

In this piece, we’re going to talk about Credit M&A, as well as the worries that some PE firms have raised their last fund, or are undifferentiated.

A couple announcements, before we get into it:

1. My Annual Compensation Report is dropping soon, sign up for Buyside Hub to make sure you can be a part of it.

2. I’m teaming up with Shortcut as my go-to AI-excel agent, excited to be working with the great team there.

Let’s get into it.

Why there needs to be consolidation in Credit

There’s been a significant amount of consolidation in Credit over the past couple years. This CVC deal is far from the first big deal.

The Marathon deal: CVC will acquire Marathon in a $1.2B deal, with $400mm coming in cash and $800mm in equity. There is also a $400mm performance-based earnout through 2029 (50% cash/50% equity). The acquisition expands CVC’s presence in the U.S. credit markets and leaves Blackstone’s GP Stakes group with a $400mm gain.

By adding Marathon’s $24B in credit assets, the transaction grows CVC’s credit business to ~$72B, with Marathon’s founders continuing to lead the rebranded CVC-Marathon strategies. CVC has had ambitions to grow its fee-paying AUM to 200B Euros by 2028, so this transaction jumpstarts that path forward. This transaction is expected to close in 3Q26.

Another extremely interesting deal from earlier this year, was EQT acquiring Coller Capital for $3.2B. The total transaction value may increase by another $500mm in cash, dependent on Coller’s business performance during the TTM period before March 2029. Coller Capital has a booming secondaries business and that’s been one of the faster growing segments in finance. EQT has 270B euros in AUM, while Coller has $50B in AUM, primarily across PE and Credit secondaries businesses. The deal is expected to close in 3Q26. Coller’s founder, Jeremy Coller owned 72% of the company, while key backers State Street and Hunter Point Capital owned 19% of the business.

Jeremy Coller and other key men will have their shares released in 1/3 increments from 2028 to 2031. The Company will rebrand to Coller EQT.

It’s been publicly reported over the past couple year that several private credit firms are marketing themselves. Back in late 2024, there was a report that State Street was seeking to acquire a private credit manager to bolster its alternative investment offerings. Generali SpA, Italy's largest insurer, took a 77% stake in MGG Investment Group, a US-based credit investment firm with $6B+ of AUM for $320mm. There are additional payments contingent on MGG’s future performance.

Notably, BlackRock acquired HPS, one of the largest private credit managers, for an incredible $12B valuation. The entire transaction was paid in BlackRock equity and an up to $675mm retention pool of BlackRock RSUs were provided to HPS employees. These were multi-year vesting periods and lockup periods in order to incentivize retention.

There’s been some layoffs around the edges, but BlackRock is a company known for small, annual layoffs.

Back in July 2024, Semafor reported that several private credit firms were running processes, with MGG among the firms mentioned. Part of this is due to the fact that smaller players are being squeezed a bit, while a lot of growth is coming from giants such as Ares, Blue Owl, and Apollo. The Semafor piece noted that Crestline, with $18B of AUM, and Waterfall with $12.5B, were seeking buyers. Two recently notable sales were Wendel, a French asset manager, acquired 75% of Monroe Capital, a $19.5B AUM Private Credit lender, for $1.13B and Blue Owl acquired Atalaya, a $10B AUM shop, for $450mm (+ $350mm of earnout). Clearlake acquired $5B AUM European private credit firm MV Credit Partners, while Hayfin agreed to an Arctos-backed management buyout. Back in May, Aflac acquired a 40% interest in LMM direct lender Tree Line Capital, while in August, Janus Henderson acquired a majority stake in Victory Park Capital, a $6B credit shop.

As mentioned in that Semafor article, eventually Crestline transacted. In late 2025, Rithm Capital completed the acquisition of Crestline. With the addition of Crestline’s $17B in AUM, and Sculptor (acquired in 2023), Rithm’s total platform is $98B.

With an abundant amount of CLO shops & private credit firms, and with spreads compressing due to competition and lower rates, there should be credit related consolidation.

Gapstow data found there were 33 acquisitions of alternative credit managers in 2024, with $260B in acquired AUM, and the massive acquisition of HPS by BlackRock made up the bulk of that acquired AUM. Wendel acquiring Monroe Capital and Blue Owl acquiring Atalaya Capital and Prima Capital were the other two big deals. Blue Owl has been on a bit of a spree over the past few years, acquiring Par Four back in August 2023.  

Tbh, a lot of the writing I’ve put out there re: Private Credit manager consolidation was much more of a 2024/2025 story. Unfortunately if you haven’t found a dance partner, you might be in a worse off state in terms of getting a deal done.

Still, there are plenty of firms that have existing credit strategies, yet still buy different managers and let them do their thing.

As many of you know, there’s “you’re only as good as your last fund” risk in this industry, so finding a dance partner is important sometimes.

From 2022-2024, we’ve really had the “golden age of private credit”, but now some cracks are starting to surface. A soft fundraising environment makes it challenging for firms to keep the gravy train going. “All it takes is a bad fund or two, and it’s over”

If you’re unable to spin up a successful new private credit group, then just buy one: This seems to be an important strategic rationale and is why firms that have their own internal private credit groups are still electing to buy a platform that has had more success. When there’s a fast-growing market like private assets, firms without the right expertise in the space are inclined to play catchup.

Crystallizing hard work is crucial too: A lot of these funds have partners who have been grinding for years. In some ways, they’ve positioned themselves better for a sale than for maintaining the company for years on end. And IPOs are very challenging to pull off unless scale is significant. There’s a reason that there’s only so many Sponsors, or funds focused on alternative investing, that are public.

Why you might actually not be laid off immediately in these transactions:

Finance is a human capital business, you’re less likely to see an immediate restructuring than you may think. While there may be redundancies, you probably noticed above that a lot of these transactions involve retention incentives, earnouts, and equity based compensation.

There are obviously situations where you’re shown the door quite quickly, but for a professional so ruthless with cost-cutting and layoffs, one can still forget that many of these transactions are done to acquire the investment team talent, not to synergize them.

Still, any group mergers or culture changes might mean that you want to find a new home. If you reported to a PM or MD and now you have to report in and earn the trust of someone else, you might find yourself disadvantaged. You can get a general sense of how a merger or acquisition will go based on what happens to your fund’s leaders.

However, we talked in a prior interview about how some private credit funds were reducing headcount due to a slow pipeline & fundraising goals not being met.

Are larger PE Professionals leaving bigger shops for smaller shops?

The WSJ had a piece highlighting that the era of golden handcuffs is over and a lot of professionals are leaving cause of worries their carry is going to be worthless or negligible and instead leaving for smaller firms where they can get a bigger slice of carry.

That is all partly true. The grass might be greener and the cost of living might be better when you join. This is a narrative that is definitely playing out.

But in many ways, it’s also a polite way to express what happened to those who got pushed out, told nicely to leave, were going to stall out regardless, or told “we don’t have a VP or Principal seat to give you given poor fundraising”.

Remember, roles in finance are pyramids and frankly, for mid-level professionals, there’s fewer seats to go around.

BUT if your firm had some poor investments and you don’t want to tie yourself to your fund’s brand, it makes sense to get out and pivot while you can. But the talent market has been extremely competitive from a supply/demand standpoint due to fewer seats and more people looking.

I think we might need to admit that there’s a bit of a game of musical chairs in finance, and headcount among the top roles may continue to shrink. Wall Street hiring has been sluggish for a few years now, and it’s very likely that given AI-related productivity gains that will materialize over the next few years, we may have hit a ceiling. Johnson Associates expects that we’ve hit a headcount peak:

The Fall of Middle Market PE:

There was an article a while back about how there’s more PE funds than McDonald’s franchises. Yes, there are apparently now 19,000 private equity funds in the U.S. - more than the 14,000 McDonald’s that are in the U.S. Overall, there’s worries that there’s too many sponsors chasing far too few deals.

It’s hard to totally believe that number though, and surely it counts some independent sponsors in that mix.

Middle market PE is another area where there’s a lot of question marks around fundraising. Bloomberg did a deep dive piece on how Trilantic, a $8B PE fund, was only able to raise 1/6 of its target fund, having to shift focus to a continuation fund, and seeing several material deal team exits. Onex, Crestview, Vestar, and Madison Dearborn were also called out as struggling to fundraise. There was also an article a year ago from Buyouts regarding American Securities letting some staff go and narrowing down its strategy to core sectors.

But Forbes really battered PE firms in a piece, namedropping, Onex, Madison Dearborn Partners, Sycamore Partners, Gryphon Investors, Littlejohn & Co, Crestview Partners, Odyssey Investment Partners, Freeman Spogli, Abry Partners, Siri Capital, Equistone Partners, FSN Capital, JC Flowers, Palladium Equity, Brentwood Associates, Revelar Capital, Vestar Capital, Pamplona Capital, and Capvis.

I’ll let you read the full article, but here’s some of the situations they called out:

• Vestar scrapped plans for an 8th PE fund back in December 2024, and is instead focused on its existing portfolio companies

• Onex paused fundraising for its 6th flagship fund in 2023, and focused on realizations

• Madison Dearborn is seeking to raise $3B for its 9th fund, its smallest raise since 1999, per a March 2025 report

To continue with the Blue Owl updates, it was reported back in December 2024 that they’ve been assessing whether to merge multiple private equity firms in order to create one giant private equity titan. It holds stakes in infrastructure companies Stonepeak and I Squared Capital and stakes in PE groups such as Platinum Equity, Silver Lake, and Vista Equity.

Obviously, PE professionals should be thinking about whether they can climb the ladder or need to pivot in Corporate, buy a small business instead, or do something else.

I found this thread below to be an interesting train of thought as well - should more PE investors be evaluating their own careers like a deal they would invest in?

“As capital has flooded the sector, the majority of returns are from multiple expansion and arbitrage, which is unsustainable, and (somewhat) related to being early on sector themes (potentially a sustainable edge). If your edge is from proprietary deal flow, how does that hold up when everyone has buyside bankers/brokers and SourceScrub? Do you have operational or value-creation playbooks that are differentiated?”

Remember my piece from last year about the world of lower hanging fruits being gone? A while ago, I argued in a piece that every rollup now is going to have to be “a harder story” or have higher-hanging fruits given a lot of lower-hanging fruit opportunities got easily plucked off the tree.

I’ve written about it a ton of times, but a lot of finance professionals need to prepare for their career being harder after 30, or 35. Depending on what path you’re on, I think you’re optimizing for either making a ton of money early on in your career or going down a corporate-CFO styled path where you can stay in your seat up until you’re 60 years old.

There is a “make or break” moment in finance where you need to start producing, otherwise your earnings capabilities will hit a hard ceiling and you will not climb up the ladder. Not everyone is going to make VP, even fewer people will make MD. And that’s okay - you need to figure out what your strengths are and what type of career path best suits you. Especially as you start considering optimizing working fewer hours as you get older.

Concluding remarks - maybe it’s somewhat of a scary time in PE or Credit. Every industry has its pros and cons though and there’s always a seat for the brightest and best performing of the bunch. Still, there’s probably far too many PE firms out there, and credit will likely follow. You should position your career plans and how much $$ you save based on this information.

Until next time.

-Harry

Btw, remember to check out the Octus credit markets league table.

Btw, Buyside Hub Can Help

Well there’s two ways to look at this - there’s 1) “Harry why the hell did you start a recruiting/job based company if finance hiring is going to decrease?” or 2) “If hiring and recruiting is going to be more competitive and firms are going to want to save materially on costs, then now is a great time for a tech-enabled, lower-cost solution.”

I obviously lean towards the latter and with a limited overhead and cost structure, with insane reach, there’s a materially unfair advantage that I think makes Buyside hub quite well positioned for lower-cost, SaaS enabled searches.

Buyside Hub is positioning itself to be not only a hub for hiring but for compensation benchmarking.

If you would like to learn more about Buyside Hub’s enterprise solutions, please reach out to me or [email protected] 

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