In the first of our Meet The Press interviews, Brickfield talks with Alice Murray, Founder and Editor-in-Chief of THE LINE_.

Alice has been covering private markets for 15 years and has built an impressive network as well as deep knowledge of the sector. Prior to establishing The Drawdown in 2017, she worked at Real Deals and then Unquote (now Mergermarket). In 2024, she launched THE LINE_, which she believes is the next step in the evolution of information sharing and community building for private capital fund operational professionals.

I very clearly remember dedicating the second ever edition of The Drawdown, back in 2017, to subscription lines. There was a lot of attention on these facilities at the time thanks to that now-famous Howard Marks memo, highlighting their impact on IRRs. That was my initial foray into this market, and it was a great time to start picking it up and really getting my head around it.

Getting involved with the conversation in those early days was huge, and I probably didn’t realise quite the extent of what was going on at the time. But I’m glad we took a tempered view by speaking to GPs and LPs and really getting to grips with why these products were being used. There was the IRR inflation criticism of sublines then as we know, but now they are completely accepted and widespread, and I’m really pleased to have been a part of that conversation early on and help shed more of a neutral light on the topic.

Setting up the Fund Finance Tracker at the Drawdown in 2021 to get an understanding of active lenders and their preferences. I remember basically locking myself in a room for about a week, just emailing and calling every lender I could, explaining the project and getting them comfortable enough that they could give me the information and understand how it would be used. I produced a new tracker every six months and would typically talk to 60 or so lenders with about 30 going on record.

I also loved putting together ‘The most influential fund finance experts’ in 2022. Through that I was able to interact with so many industry leaders across the space. For years afterwards it remained one of the most-read articles on The Drawdown.

More recently, my personal coverage has really evolved through the work I do with Alpha Private Markets. Specifically with Alpha Match and the Lender Book Report we launched last year, drawing from the database, which covers well over 300 active lenders in the space. We pull insights from that data set, which is bang up-to-date, completely unique and proprietary.

The most recent report we issued was about the leverage-on-leverage criticism of NAV facilities. We demonstrated average LTVs for NAV facilities across various fund sizes. And we evidenced that there’s only a very small amount of leverage going into a fund when a NAV facility is introduced because most of the asset level debt has been paid down by that point.

My focus has always been on the real facts and putting sensationalism aside. Recently that’s been around NAV; taking things back to the fundamentals and asking: What are GPs getting from this? What are the LPs getting from it?

Where I’m curious and fascinated though is on the lender side, and what lenders are doing to maintain the provision of fund finance. We’re seeing this rapid evolution in bank balance sheet management; synthetic risk transfers, securitisations and tie-ups with credit funds are examples of the technologies that are being adopted in this space really quickly.

We’re also seeing a massive influx of non-banks into the space, as well as insurance capital and institutional capital. There is now broad acceptance of fund finance solutions: needing that liquidity at fund level. This is important for the general health of private capital markets, therefore I’m fascinated by how supply is developing.

Aside from the excellent content Brickfield produces – wink wink – one of my must-reads is Ares’ In the Gaps newsletter, which covers the whole alternative credit space and is always a super informative and fun read.

One recent paper that I thought was very well put together was Felicitas Global Partners’ report; NAV or never: Modeling LP returns with and without a NAV loan. This is the kind of information that can provide GPs and LPs with genuine education, rather than just another survey based on a tiny sample set.

Brickfield Recruitment works with leading financial institutions in sourcing the very best fund finance talent. If you are interested in finding out more contact Rory Smith at Brickfield Recruitment on +44 7800 963 594 or at rory@brickfieldrecruitment.com.