Excess Spread is our weekly newsletter, covering trends, deals and more in structured credit and ABS. Find out more about 9fin for structured credit.

Excess Spread will be off for a summer break — next edition August 29

Do bankers do it better?

If you’re launching one of the many aspirant asset-backed private credit operations, who should run it?

Should it be someone whose greatest skills and experience lie in valuing portfolios, derisking, hedging, managing future states of the world, valuing optionality, understanding documentation and weighing probabilities?

Or someone who is good at getting out and finding clients, keeping their ears to the ground but their heads up for problems, pitching financing, coming up with solutions, structuring around constraints, and closing transactions?

Let’s call these archetypes investor and banker, although it’s an exaggerated dichotomy — successful bankers might be best at the latter, but they’re good at the former stuff too, and the reverse applies for investors.

We could reframe this a bit — is it most important to do the deals that you see at the right price, or is it most important to get access to the deals that nobody else sees at all?