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Franklin Templeton has formally announced absorbing Alcentra into the Benefit Street Partners brand.

This completes a process in which Alcentra’s European CLO management business had already taken on the Benefit Street name, as 9fin exclusively reported in December.

No redundancies among senior officials or changes to the portfolio management teams across high-yield, leveraged loans, speculations, structured or private credit functions are planned, a Benefit Street spokesperson has now told 9fin.

“Our investment teams already operate independently, but share research, distribution and operational resources across an integrated global platform and this will continue as normal,” they said.

When asked about Alcentra having stopped originating new direct lending deals, as we previously reported, the Benefit Street spokesperson added this strategy will be managed by the existing team.

In a press release on Monday 26 January, Franklin Templeton said the move marks a final step in integrating the two asset management brands since Benefit Street was acquired in 2019 and Alcentra in 2022. The wider company said its alternative credit platform, including the acquisition of Apera Asset Management in October 2025, is on track to exceed $100bn in assets under management in 2026. Franklin Templeton’s combined business has $78bn in corporate credit AuM and $14bn in commercial real estate debt strategies.

Apera is being kept separate from Benefit Street, 9fin learned.

“Apera only joined the platform late last year and has a strong brand in the European lower-middle market, which is a valuable asset,” the Benefit Street spokesperson told 9fin. “Ultimately it is too soon for a change of this nature.”

Franklin Templeton also mooted the prospect of expanding into new markets in Asia and the Middle East via acquisitions over the next five years, and into “adjacencies within the full alternative credit landscape”.

A long time coming

The writing has been on the wall for Alcentra and the move follows broader consolidation in the asset management sector. The headline of our exclusive report in December was Franklin Templeton picking Apera over the manager as the future face of its direct lending strategy.

“The Apera brand will be the focus for all future European direct lending fundraising,” a spokesperson told 9fin at the time.

Alcentra was once a market leader as an early mover into direct lending, but its capital raising efforts have since suffered. Alcentra last announced a close in direct lending in 2019 when it raised €5.5bn for its European strategy. Apera, by comparison, announced in April 2025 the closing of Apera Private Debt Fund III at €2.9bn (including leverage).

“The moment the deal was agreed I assumed Apera would emerge as the single brand over time,” one source told 9fin in December 2025. “Even if Franklin Templeton’s message in June had been Alcentra and Apera target different parts of the market and differently sized deals.”

All-in on alternative credit

Alongside the Alcentra news, Franklin Templeton also took the opportunity to publish Benefit Street research that found most investors plan to maintain or increase their exposure to alternative credit in 2026, with 51% expecting growth.

In a survey of 135 global institutional investors with a combined AuM of $8trn, the research found the main motivation for this was pursuing greater diversification (85%) and potential for higher returns in alternatives than traditional fixed income (81%).

Over the next 12 months, direct lending (39%) was second only to infrastructure debt (47%) as a strategy for increasing exposure, the survey found, followed by asset-based lending (35%), special situations and distressed debt (30%), commercial real estate (28%), and CLOs (16%).

The release said the above survey informed Benefit Street’s aforementioned plans for acquisition growth and expansion into new alternative credit geographies.