Seth Katzenstein, who joins the firm from Intermediate Capital Group, told 9fin that Antares wants to make its debut in the broadly-syndicated CLO market in the coming months.

“We plan to issue two BSL CLOs in the latter half of this year,” he said.

A loan market veteran with 25 years experience, Katzenstein set up ICG’s liquid credit platform in the US, overseeing $6bn across multiple funds. Before that, he was at Black Diamond Capital Management.

To help establish the BSL business at Antares, he’s looking to hire three or four people in the short term, with the eventual aim of building a seven-person team.

Market maturation

Antares’ expansion into the broadly-syndicated market comes after a year of significant consolidation in the maturing CLO industry.

Last year, Carlyle acquired CBAM, making it the world’s largest CLO manager, and Franklin Templeton bought Alcentra. In December, Investcorp bought Marble Point (for more on this, check out our recent interview with Investcorp’s Jeremy Ghose).

At the same time, there is an increasing overlap between the liquid credit markets and the middle-market and direct lending deals that Antares has traditionally focused on, with many large credit firms now touching all corners of sub-investment grade credit.

As such, broadly-syndicated loans have always been a “natural adjacency” to Antares’ core business model, the firm’s chief executive Timothy Lyne told 9fin last month.

Katzenstein echoed this sentiment, saying that entering this new space would enable Antares to increase its AUM, which currently exceeds $55bn.

“We’ve had reverse inquiry from investors that if we ever entered the BSL market that they would be interested in working with us,” he said. ”Expanding into the BSL market will allow Antares to broaden its investor base and AUM.”

Tough timing

Katzenstein acknowledged, however, that it’s not the easiest time to quickly build a new business in liquid leveraged loans.

Whether or not Antares can hit its target of issuing two broadly syndicated CLOs this year “depends on the pace of issuance in the primary market”, he said.

Leveraged loan issuance cooled in 2022, and this was one factor that drove a concurrent slowdown in CLO formation. The year concluded with $130.3bn of new CLO issuance, a massive decline from 2021’s record activity, according to data from JP Morgan.

A combination of higher interest rates, extreme volatility and credit quality concerns also means that a larger than usual proportion of CLOs are expected to enter the post-reinvestment stage, which could drain liquidity from the leveraged loan market.

But Katzenstein is confident that CLO issuance will recover this year, and that the asset class will weather through the wave of credit downgrades that have hit the leveraged loan market.

Loans that are rated B- comprised nearly 30% of CLO holdings as of September 2022, the highest level since the 2008 crisis, according to Barclays research. Declining earnings and rising defaults are expected in the coming months, as we reported last year.

Still, like many in the industry, Katzenstein is sanguine about the outlook for CLOs despite these headwinds in credit quality.

“CLOs could have haircuts if triple-Cs are above a certain threshold, but we think they are better positioned today than before the pandemic,” he said.