This week, we converse with Ken Kencel, who’s president and chief government officer of Churchill Asset Administration, a personal credit score agency with $46 billion in property below administration that was the highest US non-public fairness lender within the 2022 PitchBook league tables and was named 2022 Lender Agency of the Yr by The M&A Advisor. Churchill Asset Administration is an affiliate of Nuveen, the $1.1 trillion asset-management arm of TIAA. Kencel, who has greater than three a long time of expertise within the funding business, additionally serves as chairman of the board, president, and CEO of Nuveen Churchill Direct Lending Inc., Churchill’s publicly registered enterprise improvement firm.
We talk about how his profession has traced the rise of personal credit score: He started his profession within the Mergers & Acquisitions Group at Drexel Burnham Lambert, then based the high-yield finance enterprise at Chase Securities (now JP Morgan Chase), served as head of Leveraged Finance for RBC. He launched the Churchill Monetary Group in 2006, which was bought by PE large The Carlyle Group in 2011. The agency will get spun out in 2015, partnering with Nuveen, a part of the trillion-dollar asset supervisor TIAA.
Kencel explains how the unique relationship with TIAA permits a singular strategy to non-public credit score: Churchill lends to middle-market companies whereas additionally taking an fairness stake in these companies. This places the corporate on the identical facet of the desk as their shoppers, whereas giving the agency the potential for equity-level returns when corporations do properly.
He explains how extraordinarily selective Churchill is within the companies and sorts of enterprise they choose for funding: For example, he notes they didn’t have a single default throughout the complete pandemic period.
His present studying is here; A transcript of our dialog is available here Tuesday.
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You’ll want to try our Masters in Business subsequent week with Aswath Damodaran, Professor of Finance at New York College’s Stern Faculty of Enterprise. Often known as the Dean of Valuation, he teaches Company Finance and Valuation to the MBA college students at Stern the place he has been voted “Professor of the Yr” by the graduating M.B.A. class 9 occasions. His textbook “Investment Valuation” is the usual within the subject. His subsequent guide comes out in December, and is titled The Corporate Lifecycle: Business, Investment, and Management Implications.
The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz by Erik Larson