From Midtown to Wall Street

The shifting momentum from independent shops to Wall Street's biggest names

Author

James Howl-Newton
July 15, 2025

👋 Happy Tuesday, deal-makers

Private credit used to be the playground of direct-lending specialists. Now though, the big banks are jumping the fence and building their own rides. Here is what you need to know.

TL;DR

  • JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs and Citi have all rolled out new private-credit or capital-solutions units in the past six months.

  • All-in coupons above 10 percent and corporates staying private make esoteric structures too tempting to ignore.

  • That shift is rewriting the talent map for anyone with hybrid structuring skills.

The Deep Dive

Banks Are No Longer Just Watching Private Credit, They’re Building It

At the start of the decade Wall Street collected easy underwriting fees while alternative lenders pocketed double-digit yields. Not anymore. JPMorgan’s Strategic Financing Solutions group has a 50 billion-dollar war chest. Goldman Sachs paired its investment-banking franchise with 145 billion dollars of alternative AUM. Citi teamed with Apollo, Mubadala and Athene for a 25 billion-dollar direct-lending platform. The message is clear: origination and hold is back in vogue.

Why banks are leaning in

  1. Yield – SOFR north of 5 percent leaves room for double-digit coupons even after spread compression.

  2. Private for longer – Custom capital stacks with unitranche seniority, revenue shares or asset-backed cushions solve IPO and high-yield headaches.

  3. Mega-cheques required – Meta’s multi-gigawatt AI data-centre programme shows how tech and infra stories are blowing past traditional cap-ex budgets.

What “esoteric” looks like right now

Deal archetype

Collateral

Yield premium driver

GPU warehouse lines

NVIDIA H-200 clusters

Chip price volatility and quick obsolescence

Revenue-share SaaS loans

High-margin contracted ARR

Concentration risk and churn opacity

PPA-wrapped data-centres

15-year fixed power contracts

Merchant tail after contract ends

Split-asset aircraft deals

Engines in a JOLCO, fuselage in a loan

Residual-value uncertainty plus repossession hassle

Banks are turning these quirks into IG-rated senior slices for insurers while keeping mezzanine risk that can clear at double-digit yields.

Career Corner

Hybrid thinkers win – If you can model both a toll road and a cloud platform, hiring managers want you yesterday.
Middle-office makeover – Real-time covenant monitoring and ESG tagging are moving into Ops and Tech.
Search velocity – Roles that once took 180 days to fill are closing in 60, often with non-compete buyouts.

Skill Spotlight

Learn to speak “advance rate, eligibility criteria and cash sweep” fluently. Structured-product chops are now table stakes for private-credit teams inside banks.

The takeaway

The era of siloed lending is over. The next league of financiers will speak the language of bank capital and the dialect of private credit—and they will write the playbook for the decade ahead.

Have a productive week.