The latest deals and transactions in and around North American wealth management.

Investcorp, the US-based alternative investment firm, has agreed to buy Marble Point Credit Management, a business focused on collateralized loan obligations. Investcorp didn’t say how much it was paying for the deal.

With $7.8 billion of assets under management, Marble Point is a specialist asset manager focused exclusively on managing CLOs and portfolios of broadly syndicated leveraged loans. Thomas Shandell, a 38-year veteran of the credit markets, and Corey Geis, with 27 years of experience, lead the business. Marble Point is an affiliate of Eagle Point Credit Management.

(A collateralized loan obligation is a single security backed by a pool of debt.)

"The proposed acquisition of Marble Point is a significant milestone in Investcorp's 40-year journey of growth through diversification, geographic expansion and building scale,” Mohammed Alardhi (pictured), executive chairman of Investcorp, said.

When the deal is completed, Investcorp will have $50 billion in total firm assets under management, he added.

Marble Point will be combined with Investcorp Credit Management, a global credit platform with $14.2 billion in assets under management and an 18-year history of investing across credit markets worldwide.

The combined platform will manage $22 billion in assets and rank among the top 15 CLO managers globally by AuM.

The transaction, which is expected to close in the first quarter of 2023, is subject to customary regulatory requirements and closing conditions.

The main aim of CLOs is to take loans (syndicated and/or leveraged) made to corporate or private equity borrowers, and to securitize them by slicing them up into “tranches” of interest-paying bonds, thereby redistributing them from the lenders’ balance sheets to investors. These CLO pools are considerable, comprising typically 150 to 250 loans. 

According to a note from Deutsche Bank in August: “The CLO structure has proven itself having weathered the global financial crisis (GFC), and two subsequent down-cycles (if one factors in commodities and oil). Bar a slight pause in March 2021, as everyone tried to get their bearings, Covid caused barely a blip in the market’s demand, supply or functioning. While the market took a couple of years to recover from the GFC, it only took a couple of months to bounce back from Covid.”