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Overview
Direct Lending
BSP’s Direct Lending platform dates back to 2008 and provides financing solutions to businesses across the U.S. core middle market and the European lower-to-core middle market, across both sponsor-backed and non-sponsored borrowers. The strategies are designed to meet investors’ demand for income-oriented, primarily senior-secured exposure to private companies with resilient cash flows and established management teams, while emphasizing capital preservation. The platform combines direct origination, rigorous underwriting, and active portfolio management, leveraging long-standing relationships, sector expertise, and scale across regions. This approach seeks to generate consistent, risk-adjusted returns and diversified exposure to companies that are often less correlated with public markets.
Strategies
Our U.S. Direct Lending strategies provide flexible financing solutions to established U.S. middle-market companies, investing across the capital structure in first-lien, unitranche, and selectively second-lien or subordinated loans through our flagship and senior strategies. The strategies are designed to address investors’ need for consistent income and downside protection by providing access to a diversified portfolio of private loans to businesses with stable cash flows, while targeting attractive risk-adjusted returns across market cycles.
We focus on the core middle market (generally $25–100 million of EBITDA), where companies tend to have longer operating histories, meaningful equity sponsorship, and with robust documentation protections. The platform emphasizes direct origination, including non-sponsor opportunities, and aims to lead a majority of transactions, allowing greater influence over covenants, structures, and governance. Sector-specialist investment teams, disciplined underwriting, and ongoing monitoring, supported by dedicated workout and restructuring expertise, underpin our approach to credit selection and risk management. For clients, this combination of origination depth, structural control, and credit discipline is intended to produce resilient portfolios and steady income profiles.
Our European Direct Lending strategy, under the Apera brand provides senior and unitranche financing to lower middle-market companies across Europe, focusing on cash-generative businesses offering operational growth potential. The strategy is designed to meet investors’ need for a return premium to traditional public credit markets while maintaining conservative leverage, strong security packages, and covenant protections.
Our strategy prioritizes opportunities in Northern and Western Europe, where legal frameworks tend to be more creditor-friendly, and we generally aim to act as sole lender to shape terms and documentation. For investors, the strategy offers pan-European exposure to private credit with structural protections, low market correlation, and risk-adjusted returns that complement traditional fixed-income allocations.