Sector developments and company hires

Fitch Group’s ESG hub, Sustainable Fitch, has announced the launch of its ESG Scores for Leveraged Finance – the first high-coverage ESG solution for the leveraged finance industry. The ESG scores will equip the CLO investment community with an absolute scoring system which will allow for the granular assessment of environmental, social, and governance factors across leveraged finance entities and labelled issuance.

The ESG Entity Scores (ESG.ES) will offer an independent view on leveraged finance issuers’ impact on all three ESG factors, while the ESG Framework Scores (ESG.FS) will provide a view of the use of proceeds for soundness while also monitoring and tracking certain key performance indicators. These ESG.ES and ESG.FS scores will be provided on a scale from 0 to 100, and to date, have provided scores for more than 430 individual borrowers in the European market and offered an ESG view on over 75% of the portfolio in an average Fitch-rated European CLO.

This ESG data coverage is expected to be expanded into the North American CLO market and is on target for reaching 80% coverage for US CLO portfolios by the close of 2Q23. The firm hopes that its ESG Scores for Leveraged Finance will offer CLO managers an independent asset-by-asset view of a business’s impact on all ESG factors, while also allowing for comparison between issuing entities across different business activities, sectors and regions.

EMEA

Alexis De Vrieze is set to join the team at ArrowMark Partners, having spent the last 13 years at Citi. Alexis will join ArrowMark’s London office as md, and will continue to focus on SRT in his new role as he had previously in his role at Citi as a director.

Macquarie Asset Management has appointed Peter Glaser as its new global head of private credit and asset finance. Glaser brings his expertise to the asset manager from Alcentra, where he served as head of European direct lending and portfolio managers for its European direct lending funds. Glaser joins Macquarie during a period of growth, with hopes his knowledge in private credit and portfolio management will help aid the expansion of the business into new areas and beyond its current US$11.4bn in assets under management.

North America

Sun Life is set to acquire a majority stake in independent US retail distribution firm, Advisors Asset Management (AAM). Sun Life’s institutional fixed income and alternatives asset manager, SLC Management, hopes to establish AAM as its own retail distribution arm in the US. AAM currently holds 10 offices across eight states in the US, a team of 270 professionals, and oversees US$41.4bn in assets. In the transaction, Sun Life will acquire a 51% stake in AAM for US$214m and will also commit to investing up to US$400m to launch SLC Management alternative products for the US retail market to be distributed by AAM. As part of the transaction, AAM will also receive exclusive rights to offer and promote SLC Management alternative investment products to the US retail market.