As allocations to private credit grow across institutional and private wealth portfolios, investors need to look beyond fund-level returns to the borrowers, instruments, liquidity dynamics, and valuation drivers underlying performance
A Q&A with Yoel Perlman, Director, Head of LP Product at Preqin, a part of BlackRock
Private credit has moved from a specialist allocation to a mainstream component of institutional and private wealth portfolios. That shift has changed what investors need from the asset class: not only access and income, but transparency, comparability, and portfolio-level control.
The market has also become more complex in structure. Capital continues to flow into traditional closed-end funds, but investors are increasingly accessing the asset class through listed and non-traded business development companies, or BDCs, as well as other evergreen and semi-liquid structures. That has broadened access, but it has also introduced more variation in reporting, liquidity terms, and portfolio construction.
In many ways, the market has institutionalized faster than its data infrastructure. Reporting standards, disclosure formats, and analytical tools remain uneven across managers, funds, and vehicles. That matters because an investor may appear diversified across managers at the fund level, while still holding overlapping exposure to the same borrowers, sectors, or refinancing windows underneath.
That is why BDCs matter. While they are not a proxy for the entire private credit market, they offer one of the few recurring, public, loan-level disclosure sets in the asset class. Preqin data shows BDC gross asset value at more than $500bn and net asset value at more than $250bn as of 2026, making those disclosures an increasingly important reference point for understanding borrower exposures, portfolio construction, pricing, and valuation trends.
At the same time, the market backdrop has become more complex. Higher interest rates have supported income generation, but they have also increased pressure on borrowers. As refinancing windows approach across parts of the market, borrower-level and instrument-level visibility is becoming increasingly important.
Fund-level performance can tell investors what happened. It does not always tell them why it happened, or where similar risks may be building elsewhere in the portfolio.
As private credit grows and scrutiny increases, investors and managers are asking harder questions. What do they actually own? Where are risks concentrated? How much borrower or sector overlap exists across managers? What are those assets worth today? And what early signals could indicate valuation or liquidity pressure ahead?
The issue is not simply that private credit data is scarce. It's that the data is often difficult to compare. Different managers report at different levels of detail, on different timelines, and in formats that do not easily connect across funds, vehicles, or portfolios.
In practice, the same borrower may appear under different names across filings, instrument terms may be reported inconsistently, and relevant exposure data may be trapped in PDFs or manager reports rather than structured for analysis. Without significant normalization, it can be difficult to compare liquidity terms, expected cash flows, valuation approaches, or risk exposures across portfolios.
Even where detailed data is publicly available, it can be difficult to analyze at scale. In the BDC universe, investors may need to parse large volumes of 10-Ks, 10-Qs, and other periodic disclosures. The information exists, but turning it into comparable, decision-useful insight requires significant analytical effort.
The result is a comparability gap: investors are making portfolio-level decisions while much of the relevant information remains locked in document-level disclosure, manager-specific reporting, or non-standard data formats.
The first step is not simply more data. It is more comparable data.
BDCs are valuable because they disclose information at a level of detail that is often unavailable elsewhere in private credit. When that data is extracted, standardized, and linked across vehicles, it can help investors move beyond fund-level performance and see what is actually inside portfolios.
That matters because private credit risk does not sit at one level. It sits across borrowers, instruments, portfolios, and markets.
At the borrower level, investors need to know which companies they are lending to and where exposures overlap. At the instrument level, they need to understand lien position, coupon, spread, reference rate, maturity, amortization, and payment-in-kind usage. At the portfolio level, they need to identify concentrations, sponsor exposures, maturity walls, and diversification patterns. At the market level, they need comparables to assess pricing, valuation dispersion, and relative risk.
Two funds may show similar yield and stable headline performance. But loan-level data may reveal that one has greater second-lien exposure, heavier PIK usage, a nearer maturity wall, or meaningful borrower overlap with other managers in the same LP portfolio. Those differences can change the risk assessment entirely.
Comparable data can therefore change how investors underwrite new commitments, monitor existing exposures, challenge valuation assumptions, and identify where portfolio-level risks may be building before they appear in headline performance.
The real value comes when BDC disclosures are connected with broader private credit transaction intelligence, benchmarks, and analytics. That creates a more comparable view of exposures, valuation, and risk across the asset class.
For LPs, that means moving from fund labels to underlying exposures. Investors can assess portfolios across managers and strategies, identify borrower overlap, monitor concentrations earlier, evaluate valuation changes with more context, and understand how different parts of a portfolio may respond to changing market conditions.
That can improve allocation decisions, manager selection, portfolio construction, and ongoing risk monitoring. It can also help investors distinguish between portfolios that look similar at the fund level but carry different borrower, instrument, or liquidity risks underneath.
For GPs, comparable market context can make portfolio narratives more defensible. It can support underwriting, portfolio monitoring, valuation committees, and investor reporting by showing how a loan, borrower, or portfolio compares with similar exposures elsewhere in the market. Managers can also use richer data to explain how valuations, liquidity assumptions, and portfolio construction decisions are supported by market evidence.
As private credit becomes a larger allocation, investors will not be satisfied with return summaries alone. They will expect evidence.
Private credit is entering its next phase of growth. According to Preqin’s Private Markets in 2030 report, direct lending and related strategies are projected to reach $4.5tn by 2030.
As the market grows, investors will expect more standardized data and more consistent analytics, even though private credit will remain fundamentally different from public credit. The goal is not to make private credit public. It is to give investors a clearer understanding of what they own, how risk is evolving, how valuations are supported, and how liquidity dynamics may change under different market conditions.
The next phase of private credit will be defined not only by capital formation, but by data quality, comparability, and analytical depth. Investors who can see through fund labels into borrower-level, instrument-level, and portfolio-level exposures will be better positioned to underwrite commitments, monitor risk, and allocate capital as the market becomes more complex.
If the challenge is fragmented data, the solution cannot be another standalone dataset. Investors need workflows that connect private markets data, portfolio monitoring, benchmarks, exposure analysis, valuation context, and credit risk analytics.
Preqin Private Credit connects the layers investors need to analyze: fund-level performance, issuer-level exposure, instrument-level terms, benchmarks, and market comparables. By linking these layers, investors can move from fragmented reporting to decision-ready context across exposures, overlap, pricing, and valuation.
That can help investors compare managers on a more consistent basis, identify borrower and sector concentrations, assess refinancing risk, and understand how similar assets are structured, priced, and valued elsewhere in the market.
Preqin sits within a broader set of BlackRock’s technology ecosystem alongside the eFront platform, which supports portfolio management, exposure monitoring, and investment workflows, and the Aladdin platform, which provides credit risk analytics, pricing, and whole-portfolio oversight.
The objective is to turn private credit data from scattered disclosure into decision-ready context across exposures, pricing, valuation, and risk.
Preqin, a part of BlackRock, provides comprehensive private credit data, analytics and insight, spanning closed-end funds, semi-liquid structures and underlying assets. Integrated analytics and AI-powered deep research connect all private credit data in a single workflow, providing greater transparency and enabling on-demand analysis from market level to individual instruments. Learn more about Preqin Private Credit.
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