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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favorite tales on this weekly e-newsletter.
The author is a former funding banker and creator of “Energy Failure: The Rise and Fall of an American Icon”
Unstable monetary markets, like those we face now due to America’s ever evolving tariff insurance policies, usually create distinctive alternatives. Assume again to what occurred in October 2022, shortly after Credit score Suisse launched a serious enterprise restructuring and the credit-rating businesses introduced they have been downgrading the Swiss financial institution’s debt, including to the turmoil that was engulfing the then 166-year-old monetary establishment.
One of many rapid steps the financial institution took in response to the waning confidence in it was to speed up the sale of the majority of one among its crown jewels, the so-called securitised merchandise group, a big asset-based lending enterprise that created — or “originated”, in monetary jargon — merchandise corresponding to mortgages and auto loans and offered them to traders.
The enterprise was beloved inside Credit score Suisse, and one among its most worthwhile. However typically the market forces you to do stuff you don’t need to do, and the sale of this enterprise was a type of instances.
As ever, the at all times opportunistic Apollo International Administration, the choice asset supervisor, was solely too comfortable to pounce on Credit score Suisse’s rising monetary misery. That’s Apollo’s DNA. In brief order,j earlier than different, extra extremely regulated monetary establishments might act, Apollo reduce a cope with Credit score Suisse to purchase the New York-based enterprise.
Apollo purchased all of it for a slight low cost to the par worth of the mortgage portfolio, in response to one insider. It renamed the enterprise Atlas SP and set it up as a separate unit, with Apollo as the bulk proprietor and Mass Mutual, the massive insurance coverage firm, and the sovereign wealth fund Abu Dhabi Funding Authority as minority traders.
Because the deal closed in February 2023, Atlas SP has change into the cornerstone of Apollo’s bold plan to remake Wall Road, by way of the marketplace for personal credit score. “If you look again at actually, actually strategic transactions for this agency, that’s acquired to be up there,” Apollo president Jim Zelter informed me in December, “as a result of it actually was a primary large foray of an origination enterprise of that scale, owned by a non-bank.” He mentioned he jokes with Marc Rowan, Apollo’s chief government, that 5 years in the past they didn’t even know how you can spell Atlas.
Now, it’s central to the agency’s core technique of accelerating the quantity of personal credit score that Apollo originates to generate the income-producing belongings it must cowl the liabilities generated by Athene, Apollo’s wholly owned annuity enterprise. It captures the unfold between the 2 as revenue.
Of Apollo’s $785bn of belongings beneath administration, some $641bn is personal credit score, with the steadiness being personal fairness. Apollo has lengthy preached that there’s much less threat in its enterprise of the type of deposit runs and lack of investor confidence seen by some banks as a result of the period of its belongings and liabilities are each long-term and carefully matched. The message is beginning to get out. The corporate has a market worth of $86bn, up greater than 250 per cent previously 5 years, though its inventory was hit exhausting within the latest broader market turmoil. After a latest rally, it nonetheless down round 13 per cent thus far in 2025.
Apollo originated some $220bn of belongings in 2024 and has the ambition to lift that to $275bn in beneath 5 years. Atlas SP is the important thing to reaching that aspiration. It originated greater than $40bn of belongings final 12 months with a objective to do $50bn this 12 months. Atlas SP is without doubt one of the 16 loan-origination “platforms” that Apollo both owns or has a majority fairness funding in however has a selected strategic significance. Atlas SP has 300 purchasers, and every of these debtors is an originator of small loans itself, giving the enterprise tentacles throughout an enormous swath of American companies.
In some ways, Apollo’s origination companies, with Atlas on the centre, has helped fill a part of the void the previous GE Capital left after it was dismantled and offered off a decade in the past. It now offers all types of loans for stock and gear, automobiles and fleets, mortgages, funding funds and for constructing out digital infrastructure. The Atlas deal, John Zito, Apollo’s co-president, informed a Grant’s Curiosity Price Observer investor convention a 12 months in the past, “will probably be checked out as most likely probably the most revolutionary M&A transaction during the last 5 years”.
In the intervening time, the long run is right here, and it appears to be working simply high-quality. The query is: Will there be a reckoning for personal credit score and, in that case, when will or not it’s, and what’s going to trigger it? In a Might 2 Bloomberg interview, Robert O’Leary, the co-CEO of Oaktree Capital mentioned some restricted companions in personal credit score funds, anticipating a recession, have already began promoting their stakes at reductions as massive as 50 cents on the greenback, and it might get a lot worse, he mentioned, if, and when, the true pressured promoting begins.
