Cloud 9fin

It has been a busy month for the Significant Risk Transfer (SRT) market as investors returned from the Global ABS conference in Barcelona earlier this month to a flurry of new deals, 9fin’s Celeste Tamers reported.

In this episode of Cloud 9fin, US distressed debt reporter Ayden Crosby is joined by David Lucking, a partner in Linklaters' US structured finance practice, to discuss the state of SRT and unpack some of the differences and emerging trends in US versus European markets.

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In this episode of Cloud 9fin, Tanvi Gupta, global head of CLOs at 9fin, talks with Sumer Chopra, director at Alumia, to discuss how CLOs have gone from an exotic to an essential product in the eyes of institutional investors.

They discuss what’s led to the boom of family offices allocating to CLOs, double-Bs and single-Bs outperforming CLO equity, and how some endowments still struggle with the legacy bias from the GFC. They go on to unpack what the ideal pitchbook from a CLO fund manager looks like and the growth of evergreen funds, among other things.

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We are back to France — the current epicentre of European credit stress — for our second episode of Distressed Diaries.

Over the last few months, French lab company Cerba’s debt has taken a beating as fears mount over its unsustainable €3.8bn capital. Most recently, 9fin reported that creditors have started to organise and appointed legal advisors in the lead up to possible debt negotiations.

There’s no lack of drama in this episode. First, the company’s liquidity has been hit by the French government’s decision to cut tariffs on lab tests in September last year. Then CEO Emmanuel Ligner unexpectedly stepped down in March with his replacement Julien Samson only joining in early June.

The weak performance has meant climbing net leverage (to 9.3x in Q1 25 from 8.4x in FY 24), followed by recent S&P’s downgrade to CCC+ and listing of its debt from CLOs.

In this episode, our host, senior distressed reporter Bianca Boorer, sits down with 9fin’s senior distressed credit analyst Denitsa Stoyanova and senior legal consultant Rebecca Davies to talk about Cerba’s financial situation, creditors’ reactions, how the company plans to address this, what is possible under the debt docs, and more.

9fin’s analysis of Cerba’s capital structure is here and a deep dive over LME and liquidity options is here.

President Donald Trump’s much anticipated ‘Liberation Day’ sent global markets into a tizzy in April, but how did private credit firms react?

During what we have termed the ‘Deliberation Days’ of Q1, private credit investors were scrambling to mitigate potential tariff risks as best they could but they were also on the offensive.

Elijah Jackson’s latest quarterly report on the state of the market, ‘Good Deal Hunting’, is aptly titled as direct lenders did not shy away from stealing BSL marketshare during the period. And PC firms were also able to pick up an extra 25bps of spread on average — how d’ya like them apples?

David Brooke, 9fin’s private credit editor, sat down with Elijah on this week’s episode of Cloud 9fin to unpack some of the wicked smart moves that lenders made.

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In this week’s episode of Syndication Nation, a podcast dedicated to all things leveraged finance-related, 9fin deputy editor Sasha Padbidri and head of legal James Wallick have put together a terrible headline and a great conversation on the emergence of President Donald Trump’s tariff language in new issue debt documents.

For more details (and terrible headlines), check out our reporting on Spanish waste management company Urbaser, which is among the first leveraged credits to include tariff language in its new issue bond OM.

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In this episode of Jane’s LME Addiction, our head of LME coverage Jane Komsky brings in Rachel Murray, a managing director at Moelis, to discuss how today’s restructuring environment compares to the Covid era and how that experience can guide clients. They discuss what makes an LME effective, in addition to current trends and techniques that are shaping the space.

Check out all of our LME coverage at 9fin.com.

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In this episode of Cloud 9fin, Tanvi Gupta, global head of CLOs at 9fin, talks with Yang Xu, CEO at City Hall Capital, to discuss the growth of family offices allocating to CLOs.

They talk about how CLO equity and mezz ticks all the boxes for family offices, the need for more double-B CLO funds, captive equity vs third party equity funds, and how CLO managers need to do more to educate family offices, which other asset classes do better.

In the inaugural episode of Syndication Nation, 9fin’s podcast on all things syndicated debt, deputy editor William Hoffman joined US managing editor Bill Weisbrod to talk about his recent coverage of Warner Bros. Discovery and its $37bn of debt to high yield by S&P. They discussed what led to the downgrade, the prospects for the company reaching full-blown fallen angel status, and broader implications for the high yield market if and when that happens.

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In today’s market, speed of information and up-to-the-minute accuracy are essential in portfolio management. With that in mind, Chase Collum, head of podcasts at 9fin, sat down with Scott Alintoff at FIS to discuss how lenders can ensure they’re staying ahead in these turbulent times.

In this third of a series of discussions, Scott shares a high level view of the state of the market, current challenges, and how technology is helping people in the middle office manage the mountains of data that underly the broadly syndicated and private debt markets.

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Altice France’s restructuring negotiations has been one of the hottest talks of the distress town since last year. With the company now preparing to enter into accelerated safeguard proceedings, we went through what happened so far in our inaugural episode of Distressed Diaries — a brand new 9fin podcast series focused on distressed debt in Europe.

Senior distressed reporter Bianca Boorer, host of the series, travelled to Paris to meet with key advisors involved in the negotiations. She sits down with Saam Golshani, partner at White & Case who acted for Altice France and its shareholders, Jean-Pierre Farges, restructuring partner and head of Gibson Dunn’s restructuring practice in Europe who represented the ad hoc group of secured creditors, and restructuring partners Lionel Spizzichino and Batiste Saint-Guily from Wilkie who represented a group of predominantly unsecured creditors.

In the podcast, we take a look at Altice France’s journey from March 2024 with the earnings call in March 2024 where management caused panic in the market announcing its intention to do discounted transactions to bring leverage down, to creditors forming the first co-op of this size in Europe and finally coming to an agreement in February this year.

We also discuss what the deal means for the restructuring market — will LMEs continue to crop up in Europe or will directors duties put people off risking putting the company at risk? Tune in to find out.

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