With alternative fixed income and structured credit on the rise, Aegon Asset Management is focusing on Europe’s most sophisticated markets
Frank Meijer (left) and Erik den Hertog, Aegon Asset Management
Aegon Asset Management is an active global manager with four investment platforms: fixed income, real assets, equities, and multi-asset & solutions. It has $446bn (€390bn) AUM and employs 1,100 people across 16 offices in North America, Latin America, Europe, and Asia.
Frank Meijer is Head of Alternative Fixed Income and Structured Finance. He’s responsible for the firm’s private credit and structured finance activities in Continental Europe and the UK. Prior to Aegon AM, he worked at ABN AMRO. He’s also a permanent guest lecturer at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
Erik den Hertog is Head of Client Group – Continental Europe. He leads commercial activities across the region, overseeing the alternative fixed income, liquid fixed income, and fiduciary business lines. He previously worked at Royal Bank of Scotland, Capgemini, and ABN AMRO. He’s based in Amsterdam.
They spoke with Shaun Beaney and Kerstin Weil at Preqin First Close about investor appetite for alternative fixed income, asset-backed securities (ABS), collateralized loan obligations (CLOs), subscription-line finance, and financing Europe’s SMEs.
Erik den Hertog: We manage about €390bn on behalf of pension funds, insurers, banks, wealth managers, and individual investors globally. We have deep expertise in fixed income, real assets, equities, and also alternatives – particularly around structured credit and alternative fixed income.
We’re set up as a global firm, so we can leverage all the global capabilities from an investment, research, and operational point of view. That said, the client domain is set up regionally, so we have close proximity to clients.
We have been investing in many of these markets for decades – initially managing assets for insurance balance sheets, with Aegon as the key one, and subsequently for external clients. We’ve been investing in US CLOs since 1999 and in European CLOs since 2005. Today we manage around €24bn in ABS and CLO strategies, including around €5bn in European CLOs. We’re also an active CLO issuer.
Frank Meijer: In Europe, the term refers to anything that’s non-traditional fixed income. So structured finance on one hand, and private debt on the other. It’s essentially private credit packaged either in liquid format – such as ABS – or it’s private credit outright. If you put them together, it’s alternative credit. Another way to describe it is that you need traditional yield, then alternative credit will give you a yield pick-up over similar rated government bonds or corporate credit.
In alternative credit, you can have a positive impact on the terms, covenant levels, and so on. There’s more you can negotiate. And it’s also a diversifier because there are now a lot of different borrowers.
Frank: Subscription-line finance used by private equity firms and capital call finance are basically the same thing. It can also be structured as a revolving credit facility (RCF). The fund manager has a line with the bank, so they can draw money to make an acquisition and then pay off the RCF or term loans when they make a cash call on their investors.
Capital call finance is a large market, over $1tn. For relationship banking, you want to have good relationships with private equity firms to advise on the next transaction. So all the banks do it. These are short-dated receivables, so it’s semi-liquid, private, but it’s still relatively short in nature. And the yield is good compared with liquid corporate credit.
These fund finance assets work for all the clients we service. They work for banks under the Basel standards, including smaller banks. They work for insurance companies – because they are short-dated and therefore attract a relatively low capital charge under the Solvency II framework. And they work for pension funds approaching buyout, because they’re short dated, semi-liquid, pooled funds. We saw $1.5bn-plus inflows from these different client groups within one year of pitching the Capital Call Finance Fund.
Erik: If you look at the regional perspective, the Netherlands and the UK are among the most sophisticated markets in Europe. They also tend to be the early adopters in fixed income. Germany remains an important market, particularly for high-rated CLOs and insurance-oriented solutions, while in France we’re seeing growing demand from institutional allocators. Southern Europe is increasingly embracing alternative fixed income.
In terms of categories of institutional investor, insurance companies are still focused on high quality, income-producing assets, so they’re looking for ways to maintain robust credit quality while also managing regulatory capital efficiently. Meanwhile, pension reforms in the Netherlands have led to a change in asset allocation. In the past, more was going into the ‘matching’ bucket – the safer one. Now, it’s moving into the ‘return’ bucket, and pension funds are looking to achieve higher yield away from traditional assets – looking for attractive, risk-adjusted returns.
Frank: For this new private debt fund, we’ve built a team of 13 people over the last 10 years with a private equity, banking, or advisory background. They focus mostly on the Netherlands. That gives us a competitive edge: there are not many direct lenders out there that have as big a team as we do, centered on the Netherlands.
We also focus on the different loan types – senior lending, unitranche lending, subordinated loans to small-caps, and small mid-caps. We cover the lower-middle market, down to SMEs. Many of our loans are also backed by European Investment Fund guarantees.
We have formal contracts with the major banks for senior loans and subordinated loans, and we’re the only party in the Netherlands who has the EIF guarantee.
Erik: Our alternative franchise is one of the bigger ones in Europe. We manage more than €85bn across the range of alternative fixed income strategies for more than 400 third-party clients. The experience we’ve built through different market cycles is something we see more and more appetite for, because we’re able to navigate increasingly complex investment challenges. At the end of the day, clients are not looking for products, they’re looking for solutions.
Shaun Beaney is Editor of Preqin First Close. It’s quick, easy, and free to subscribe here
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Special thanks to Joanna Mirea at Aegon Asset Management, and Joe Horner and Fionnuala Joseph at BlackRock.
The views expressed are the opinions of Aegon Asset Management as of September 2026. They do not constitute an endorsement, recommendation, or any other advice, and are subject to change. The content does not necessarily express the views of BlackRock, Preqin, or any of their affiliates. Aegon Asset Management is not affiliated with Preqin.