By Bill Ebinger | ABF Global Search
Private credit executive search firms are tracking the talent shifts as credit secondaries reshape direct lending in Q2 2026.
$50 billion in a single quarter. That’s HarbourVest’s run-rate in credit secondaries through Q1 2026 — on track to more than double last year’s full-year record. JPMorgan has traded $2 billion of private credit loans this year, more than in all prior years combined.
Diameter Capital has executed 15 trades in two months. The total selling projected for the year sits at $150 to $200 billion.
The activity is more than a volume story. For private credit executive search firms watching the $1.8 trillion asset class, it is the structural feature direct lending was supposed to lack — a working secondary market emerging in real time. Q2 2026 finds the largest platforms building the desks and underwriting cultures needed to operate in it.
On the firm’s most recent BDC earnings call, Armen Panossian, Co-CEO of Oaktree Capital Management, framed it directly. Secondary private transactions, he said, “will reshape the private credit landscape as certain market participants look to optimize their asset portfolio or satisfy liquidity demands.”
Why are credit secondaries suddenly active?
For most of the last decade, private credit was sold on a single premise: accept the illiquidity, earn the premium. Lender groups stayed tight, and prices stayed stable. That stability was, until recently, the defining feature distinguishing direct lending from public markets.
What’s changed is scale. The private credit market has grown into a $1.8 trillion asset class. The earliest vintages — originated before the Federal Reserve’s tightening cycle — are now maturing into a higher-rate, tighter-credit environment.
Managers want to reposition. LPs are asking for liquidity they were not originally promised.
Per Bloomberg, the activity reflects what amounts to the industry’s first real stress test after years of breakneck growth. The drivers are concrete: surging redemption requests, banks marking down loans pledged as collateral for financing facilities, and BDCs trimming software exposure as concern mounts over AI-driven disruption.
Those pressures are now finding resolution through a secondary market that, until recently, many managers considered almost taboo. The taboo is breaking quickly.
Who is buying and who is selling?
The buyer-seller composition is where the signal is.
Apollo Global Management has bought more private loans in secondary deals than it has sold in recent months. KKR has been selling loans from the BDC it co-manages with Future Standard.
Blue Owl Capital sold a $1.4 billion portfolio earlier this year while continuing to manage the underlying loans through non-discretionary accounts. New Mountain Capital took a different route, selling a roughly $480 million portfolio from its BDC and ceding control of the underlying assets.
Diameter Capital Partners is on the buy side, scooping up assets as sellers emerge. “Secondaries are something you’re going to hear a lot about for the next few years,” Scott Goodwin, Diameter’s co-founder, said at the Sohn Investment Conference.
Some sellers are responding to balance sheet pressures specific to their portfolios. Goldman Sachs’ BDC, GSBD, is trimming exposure to ARR loans — credits underwritten against software companies’ annual recurring revenue rather than profits. “We are proactively managing our legacy ARR positions through strategic exits or by facilitating conversions to Ebitda based loans,” Vivek Bantwal, global co-head of private credit at Goldman Sachs’ asset management unit, said during the BDC’s most recent earnings call.
What does the pricing look like?
The mechanics are still opaque. Most trades move through processes resembling bids-wanted-in-competition, or BWICs, in which loans of varying quality — bundled together with equity stakes — are bid as a single portfolio. The bundling limits markdown pressure on the weaker pieces by burying their value inside the composite bid.
Per Bloomberg, those portfolios are reportedly changing hands only slightly below par. That pricing tells you something. It tells you that sellers are still negotiating from a position of optionality, not desperation.
And it tells you that buyers — many of them the same long-duration institutional managers who built the asset class — see enough value to transact at near-par on performing-but-mixed portfolios.
“There’s more activity and conversations happening today than there were a year ago,” Ed Goldstein, CIO at Coller Credit Secondaries, told Bloomberg. The implication is that pricing transparency is a lagging indicator. Activity comes first; price discovery follows.
What is JPMorgan’s role in this market?
Banks are taking a larger role matching buyers and sellers in private credit secondaries. JPMorgan reported that it has already traded $2 billion of private credit loans this year — more than in all prior years combined.
That number signals something structural. Private credit was built outside the broadly syndicated loan infrastructure that banks dominate. The very absence of bank intermediation was supposed to be a feature. Now, with $2 billion of loans matched by a single bank in roughly a quarter, the infrastructure is being built — alongside, not replacing, the manager-to-manager negotiations that have dominated until now.
The trade processes are still bespoke. Money managers are often required to sign non-disclosure agreements before bidding on portfolios, with financial penalties for violations. Sellers typically need sign-off from multiple parties, including private equity sponsors and the agent lender that helped administer the original deal. Trades within existing lending groups — or to limited partners with co-investment agreements — happen faster because approvals are unnecessary.
What this signals for private credit executive search firms
In three decades of placing senior credit professionals across alternative credit, we have observed that asset classes acquire new infrastructure only when scale forces them to. The private credit asset class has reached that point. When markets transition like this, talent infrastructure typically follows the capital.
A functioning secondaries market is not a one-role hire. The function logically requires origination, structuring, and portfolio management working in coordination. The skill set is hybrid: traditional credit underwriting alongside portfolio-level pricing instincts and the ability to evaluate concentrated risk in bundled positions — capabilities direct lenders have not historically needed in combination.
The bank-side picture is shifting too. The implication of JPMorgan’s $2 billion in matched trades is structural: major banks now play an intermediation role between private credit holders and buyers — a function that did not exist in this form before. For private credit executive search firms watching the asset class, that points to a new talent category to map.
At the sponsor level, private equity firms are operating trading desks of their own to facilitate transactions in the credits they originated. That is a new pattern — and one that suggests sponsors will need a different talent mix on those desks than they have today, drawing from direct lending, asset-backed finance, and structured credit backgrounds.
The throughline: when an asset class develops a working secondary market, every adjacent talent role tends to shift. Search firms covering this space that understand the shift are positioned to help platforms get the right hires in place before the market matures further and the talent premium rises.
Frequently asked questions about credit secondaries
What are credit secondaries in private credit?
Credit secondaries are transactions in which lenders sell existing private credit loans — either individually or bundled into portfolios — to other lenders or specialist buyers. In private credit, this practice has historically been rare because direct lending was structured around stable lender groups and unchanged positions held to maturity. The recent surge in volume reflects a maturing asset class where managers need to actively reposition portfolios and LPs increasingly demand optionality on liquidity. Trades take the form of partial portfolio sales, full portfolio exits, or BWIC-style bundled auctions in which loans of varying quality are bid as a single block. The buyers include specialist secondary funds, the largest private credit platforms purchasing at scale, and opportunistic firms looking for discounted positions. The market is projected to see $150 to $200 billion of selling across 2026.
Why are private credit secondaries volumes accelerating in 2026?
Three forces are converging. First, scale: the private credit asset class has grown to $1.8 trillion, and the earliest vintages — originated before the Federal Reserve’s tightening cycle — are now maturing into a different rate and credit environment than the one in which they were underwritten. Second, redemption pressure: LPs who accepted the asset class’s illiquidity are now asking funds to provide liquidity that direct lending was not structured to easily offer. Third, repositioning: certain BDCs are pulling back on software loans as AI-driven business model risk gets repriced, and Goldman’s GSBD has publicly said it is proactively managing its legacy ARR positions through strategic exits or Ebitda-based conversions. The convergence of these forces is producing the supply that has matched waiting buyer demand from firms including Apollo and Diameter Capital.
How are private credit executive search firms helping platforms build secondaries teams?
A functioning secondaries market in private credit will likely draw talent from three broad pools. The first is origination and underwriting professionals with the seasoning to evaluate concentrated positions in bundled portfolios. The second is bank-side professionals who can match buyers and sellers — a role that did not exist as a structural function before. The third is portfolio managers from the broadly syndicated loan world who bring secondary-market pricing instincts. The most effective placements will tend to combine traditional private credit underwriting backgrounds with adjacent experience in liquid credit trading, structured credit, or specialist secondary funds. Platforms that build secondaries capability early tend to attract better talent before the market matures further and the premium rises.
Contact ABF Global Search to discuss your executive hiring needs in private credit.
Bill Ebinger is the founder of ABF Global Search, a boutique founder-led retained executive search firm specializing in alternative credit, with over 30 years of experience placing senior professionals across asset-backed finance, CLOs, securitized products, private credit, and direct lending.
Source: Bloomberg — bloomberg.com