Credit Markets in Transition: Asset-Based Finance Part II

You're listening to All the Credit, a monthly podcast series brought to you by PGIM, an active global investment manager. Welcome to All the Credit. I'm Brian Barnhurst, head of global credit research with PGIM Public Fixed Income. Today's podcast is focused on all things asset based finance. I'm very fortunate to be podcast is focused on all things asset based finance. I'm very fortunate to be joined by our head of ABF, Oliver Neeson. Oliver, welcome to the podcast. Happy to be here. Thanks, Brian. You joined the firm earlier this year, and I thought it would be interesting given that you're newer to PGIM to talk a little bit about your background. In our discussions, your career journey from the banking side to the buy side has, in some ways, mimicked the evolution of asset based finance itself. So I think it's an interesting place to start. Yeah. Thanks, Brian. That's a great place to start. I've been in asset financing and securitization for a little under twenty three years. Originally starting my career at Morgan Stanley, working on the sell side of the business at a bank in mortgage finance and mortgage securitization. Evolving from there, I spent a bunch of time at Credit Suisse in consumer, commercial, and resi mortgage finance. And then ultimately, that led to me moving from the banking side of the world to an investor seat at Blackstone, helping lead asset based finance there for several years, which ultimately led me to joining PGIM this year as head of ABF. I would say that arc has been very valuable for my career in the sense that I started working from the bottom up, really digging into, as a young analyst, the cash flow profile and the credit and market risk components of this business starting from the collateral. And that allowed me to build a really valuable cement foundation to then grow that into a whole bunch of other lanes to work through. So your background has started on the banking side, much like the sector. And over the length of your career, the sector has migrated into the asset management world seemingly at an accelerating pace, and we'll talk about some of the drivers of that accelerated pace. But I wanna really try to understand your investment style, how the team focuses and directs attention on the different opportunity set and how you think about from the top down now constructing a collective effort to both originate and underwrite different investments. Sure. So fundamentally, ABF means a lot of things to a lot of people. It's It's the ultimate catchall. It's the ultimate catchall, and it's getting a lot of press. But what we really invest in in kind of a fundamental manner are highly predictable and contractual cash flows and or stable asset values in the real economy. So to directly address the question of our approach as a business, my investing style, I come back to the beginning of …