I recently had the privilege of moderating at FT Live's Private Credit Connect in London - one of the most significant gatherings in the UK private credit calendar, with over 180 senior fund managers, institutional investors, and ratings specialists in the room.
The market mood was bullish. It usually is at these events. But I've learned over the years that the most important signals aren't in the keynotes - they're in the corridor conversations, the unguarded comments between sessions, and the questions that speakers hesitate before answering.
Beneath the confidence, one concern sitting inside private credit portfolio's kept surfacing: portfolio visibility.
Let's be honest about what's sitting in a lot of books right now.
The 2021 LBO vintage is quietly maturing into a very different rate environment to the one it was written in. These aren't dramatic defaults - they don't announce themselves with a headline or a missed payment. They emerge as PIK toggle elections, covenant amendments, and interest coverage ratios that drift toward breach rather than snap through it.
A slow, silent bleed.
And the uncomfortable reality is that most fund managers simply cannot see it coming - not with quarterly borrower data, not without live market context, and not without infrastructure that tells you what's normal versus what's a warning sign.
You can't benchmark deterioration in isolation. You need to know what the market is doing around that borrower at the same time.
This is the structural infrastructure gap that GFA Exchange was built to close.
Our market terminal continuously monitors the Top 10,000 UK businesses in the £5m–£100m turnover range, generating the proprietary GFA Score - enabling private credit fund managers to benchmark borrower financial performance against live market data every day.
Not historical averages. Not peer-reported figures. What is actually happening in the market, right now.
With AIFMD II sharpening oversight requirements, the regulatory pressure is real. But I'd encourage fund managers not to think about this as a compliance exercise.
The funds that build genuine market benchmarking infrastructure into their monitoring process will have a structural edge - in early risk detection, in LP reporting, and in the quality of decisions they make under pressure.
The question is no longer whether you need this infrastructure. It's whether you move first.
The right intelligence-based conversations matter.
What events like Private Credit Connect do brilliantly is compress the relationship timeline. One day, the right room, and you leave with conversations that would otherwise take months to initiate.
I came away energised, and clear-eyed.
The market benchmarking gap in lower mid-market private credit is systemic, not niche. The awareness is growing. And the appetite for a real solution is there.
If you were in the room and we didn't get the chance to connect, or these themes resonate with what you're navigating in your own portfolio — let's talk.
