By Bill Ebinger | ABF Global Search
Hard-asset and low-obsolescence strategies are reshaping private market executive search as capital repositions toward tangibility across credit and infrastructure.
Apollo’s HALO framework carries direct signals for private market executive search. The framework — Hard Assets, Low Obsolescence — isolates assets with enduring utility and high replacement cost. It names cell towers, fiber networks, water infrastructure and transmission grids. The thesis is simple. In a regime defined by persistent inflation and a higher cost of capital, value anchored in physical tangibility behaves differently from value anchored in financial tailwinds. That distinction matters for how credit and infrastructure teams are built. We read HALO less as an asset-selection tool and more as a map of where durable underwriting talent concentrates.
What Makes an Asset Durable Now?
Apollo frames the question directly. Rather than asking whether an opportunity sits in infrastructure, real estate or private equity, investors ask what makes an asset durable across regimes. The past decade rewarded growth and multiple expansion. The next cycle may reward something anchored in essential function and structural scarcity.
Three properties define HALO assets in the source analysis. They embed inflation linkage through regulated rate structures and leases that reset on CPI. They show lower downside capture than broad private equity during downturns. And they benefit from technological progress rather than being displaced by it.
The nondiscretionary nature of the underlying demand is the load-bearing idea here. Electricity, water, connectivity and core logistics remain in demand regardless of conditions. You can disrupt software overnight. You cannot rebuild infrastructure overnight. That asymmetry is why physical collateral supports financing access even during credit market stress.
Where Does HALO Show Up in Credit?
The source places HALO squarely inside private credit. Asset-based finance, equipment finance and collateralized strategies can finance aircraft, railcars, shipping vessels and specialized industrial equipment. Lenders often hold senior or structurally protected positions in the capital stack.
What distinguishes these transactions is the underwriting basis. Lenders underwrite against tangible collateral, contractual cash flows, replacement value and asset recoverability. They do not rely solely on enterprise value or refinancing conditions. Infrastructure debt and project finance extend the framework with long-duration cash flows that are frequently contracted, regulated or inflation-linked.
This maps cleanly onto how the broader ABF market is described in credit research. The global private ABF market reached $6.1 trillion in 2024, nearly double its pre-crisis peak. One projection puts it at $9.2 trillion by 2029. ABF repayment is backed by diversified pools of hard or financial assets, not corporate operating cash flows. That structural difference is precisely what HALO-oriented credit is built to capture.
Why Does Collateral Change the Hiring Question?
Collateral-based lending demands a different underwriting skill set than cash-flow lending. Research on ABF notes that these investments typically carry a one-to-five-year average life with substantially self-amortizing payment profiles. Direct lending, by contrast, tends toward three-to-five-year bullet structures.
That amortization profile changes the analytical work. Teams model asset recovery, replacement value and collateral performance across pools rather than a single borrower’s earnings. We think of this as a distinct competency band — closer to structured credit and securitization than to sponsor-backed corporate lending.
The talent that underwrites aircraft, railcars or fiber cash flows is not interchangeable with the talent that underwrites a leveraged buyout. ABF research also flags an average correlation near 0.61 to other asset classes. That diversification is a portfolio argument. It is also a signal that the people building these books draw on a specialized, less fungible skill base.
What Is Driving the Demand Backdrop?
The source anchors demand in physical need, not sentiment. The data center sector alone is projected to require up to $6.7 trillion in investment by 2030 to meet accelerating compute demand. The United States faces a $3.7 trillion challenge to modernize existing systems for electrification and digitalization.
Reshoring of semiconductor fabrication, battery production and defense manufacturing adds sustained demand for specialized industrial facilities and power infrastructure. Apollo describes physical infrastructure as the substrate that technological change runs on. AI, cloud and digital services require data centers, power generation, transmission and fiber.
The structural backdrop for ABF reinforces this. The number of U.S. commercial banks has roughly halved since 2000. As traditional banks retreat from lending under post-crisis regulation and capital requirements, non-bank lenders have stepped into the gap. That retreat created the structural opening HALO-style credit now occupies.
What Does HALO Mean for Private Market Executive Search?
The specific fact worth anchoring to is the underwriting basis Apollo describes: collateral, contractual cash flows, replacement value and recoverability. This is a different discipline from enterprise-value lending. It sits closer to securitized products than to cash-flow direct lending.
Layer in the structural theme from credit research. Bank retreat under regulatory and capital pressure has transferred credit risk to non-bank platforms. That transfer built the ABF market from a $6.1 trillion base toward a projected $9.2 trillion. The people who can source, structure and underwrite against hard-asset pools sit at the center of that shift.
For teams evaluating build-out, the structural feature to track is duration alignment between long-lived physical assets and the capital financing them. The practical question for CIOs and Heads of Credit is whether a platform can staff collateral-based underwriting depth as origination scales. That competency does not transfer automatically from sponsor-backed lending. It is the variable we watch when private market executive search touches hard-asset credit.
Frequently Asked Questions
What should allocators know about private market executive search here?
The core signal is that HALO cuts across four verticals at once — private equity, private credit, infrastructure and real estate. Apollo frames these as different access points to the same characteristics: tangibility, essentiality and low obsolescence. For allocators, that means the underwriting talent is organized by competency, not by traditional asset-class label. A collateral-based credit underwriter shares more with a securitization analyst than with a corporate direct lender. The practical implication is that senior coverage should be evaluated on demonstrated experience with tangible-asset recovery, replacement-value analysis and contractual cash flow structuring. These skills anchor durability across regimes. As the ABF market scales toward its projected $9.2 trillion size, the depth of that specialized bench becomes a differentiator between platforms competing for the same hard-asset opportunities.
How does HALO-oriented credit differ from direct lending in staffing?
The difference starts with the underwriting basis. Direct lending underwrites corporate operating cash flows and typically holds three-to-five-year bullet structures. HALO-oriented ABF underwrites diversified pools of hard or financial assets, with a one-to-five-year average life and self-amortizing profiles. That changes the daily analytical work. Teams model collateral performance, recovery rates and replacement value across pools rather than a single borrower’s earnings. The people who do this well often come from structured credit, securitization or equipment finance backgrounds. They are not readily substitutable with sponsor-coverage bankers. The correlation profile of ABF — near 0.61 to other asset classes — reflects that structural distinctness. For platforms building hard-asset credit, the staffing question is whether existing corporate-lending teams can extend into collateral-based work or whether specialized hires are required.
Where does the demand backdrop leave infrastructure and real estate teams?
Physical demand, not market sentiment, sets the backdrop. The data center sector alone is projected to need up to $6.7 trillion by 2030, and the U.S. faces a $3.7 trillion infrastructure modernization challenge. That demand runs through power generation, transmission, fiber and specialized industrial facilities. For infrastructure and real estate credit teams, the implication is sustained, policy-backed origination need across long-lived assets. Apollo notes these assets often operate under regulated or contracted frameworks with inflation linkage. Staffing follows the asset: teams need people fluent in regulated rate structures, long-duration project finance and replacement-value underwriting. As electrification and digitalization expand the opportunity set, the bench that can underwrite these frameworks becomes harder to build quickly. That scarcity is what makes senior hiring in this space a structural, not cyclical, question.
Bill Ebinger leads ABF Global Search, a boutique retained executive search firm specializing in asset-based finance, CLOs, securitized products, private credit, direct lending, fund finance and real estate debt. The firm draws on more than three decades of structured credit experience and a 35,000-relationship network across the alternative credit ecosystem.
Source: Apollo Global Management — https://www.apollo.com