From View From The Top, 29 April 2026
The Platform
What I Think Matters More Than Deals
I think there’s a version of private credit that looks straightforward from the outside. Find the deals. Price the risk. Deploy the capital. Collect returns. Sounds easy enough. Rinse and repeat. That would be ideal.
The reality is different. I think a lot of people who went into private credit, some of them experienced people who left institutions over the past few years to build their own platforms believed that version. I know I was one of them. How hard can it be? Most of them, like me have since discovered a different reality – and today it’s playing out in real time. The market has become more challenging full stop and all the risks that you think you’ve covered have become suddenly a revelation.
And it’s not because the deals aren’t here. The deals are there. Private debt is a big business but getting the right capital to the ground and then managing that risk is not as easy you might think.
Because the platform – the business— the infrastructure that surrounds the deals, that supports them and makes them investable — is a very different build from anything they did inside a large organisation that had that infrastructure in place.
WHAT NOBODY TALKS ABOUT
When most people think about what makes a private credit or real estate debt platform successful, they think about origination. Deal flow. Relationships. The ability to source transactions that others can’t reach. That’s the pitch.
Of course that matters. And it’s real. But it’s only approximately 20% of what a functioning platform requires.
I’d say the other 80% is operational. Legal. Compliance. Governance. Reporting. Administration. That’s the hard bit, and hard to pull together – for any new manager.
This is the less glamorous part nobody talks about. And it’s the part that determines whether a platform works— or doesn’t. I can honestly say it’s not easy.
WHAT DUE DILIGENCE ACTUALLY LOOKS LIKE
Capital — the allocators, the fund of funds, the pension mandates, the sovereign wealth vehicles — they all have a process for evaluating platforms and underlying deals and it is thorough. It is structured. It is time consuming, and it goes very far beyond the portfolio.
So when building a private credit platform, in such a competitive market, there are a few areas LPs and institional partners will look at first before a deal even gets on the table in a credit meeting:
1. The Regulatory framework
2. Legal structure
3. Governance
4. Valuation policy
5. Risk framework
6. Operations and reporting
7. And lastly, Track record and attribution
These are not box-ticking exercises; they are glimpses of genuine tests of whether a platform has been built to standard or whether it’s a deal operation with a fund wrapper around it.
WHAT SEPARATES THE PLATFORMS THAT GET BACKED
After thirty years of building platforms — and watching others try to both successfully and not so successfully — I think the pattern is consistent. The managers who successfully attract capital share a few characteristics that have nothing to do with their deal flow. I’ve learned that especially over the last 6 years in credit.
They treat the platform as a business from day one. A business with systems, processes, and infrastructure. This is by far the hardest part as you try to originate deals and manage a portfolio.
They hire for the gaps early. The best deal person in the world cannot also be the compliance officer, the fund administrator, the investor relations function, and the legal team. We have done that, and I can tell you it’s not easy juggling all those balls. Most managers start with a light balance sheet and that doesn’t get those issues solved. Platforms that try to make a small team do all of this fail under strain — or they succeed slowly despite the operational drag.
They build before they need it. The compliance framework, the legal documentation, the governance structure — these are not things to retrofit when an institutional allocator asks for them. They are things to have in place before the conversation starts. Again a balance sheet problem most come to terms with eventually.
And they understand that institutional capital is not just buying exposure to a deal pipeline. It is buying confidence in the infrastructure around it or the ability to build it in real time. Confidence that capital will be deployed responsibly, reported accurately, and returned in an orderly way.
HARD LANDING
Over the years I’ve watched a number of talented people leave institutions with genuine capability, good relationships, and strong deal flow. Some have built platforms that institutional capital has backed. Some and many are still waiting. Some are of course entirely gone. The difference, almost always, isn’t the deals. It’s the infrastructure around them. The business.
It takes longer to build a business than most people realise. It costs much more. Both in time and financial resources. It requires skills and resource that are different from deal skills.
But if done properly— it creates something that deal flow alone never can. A business. Not a pipeline.
