Welcome & Introductory Remarks

Good afternoon. I'm not miked up so I'm going to have to stand behind the lecton here. But um warm welcome to you this afternoon. When the organizers of ADFW asked us to host um this private credit event as part of their big week, we're extremely honored. So, I just want to take this opportunity to say a huge thank you um to ADGM, ADFW for that.

So, private credit, I think we can all agree that never has private credit gotten quite so much attention as it has now. Scarcely a days goes by that we don't read uh something about it in the press. Um whether this be concerns expressed by commercial bank leaders, yes, I think we've all heard that cockroach analogy. Whether it be uh regulators, central banks, um financial stability authorities, all saying that private credit needs closer monitoring and maybe some stage in the future greater regulation. Uh or perhaps it's the clamor by many sideline commentators proclaiming that private credit is the next awful thing that's going to cause uh and bring about financial Armageddon.

Of course, success always comes at some price and but investors have committed growing capital into private credit funds over a very long period now and they're seeing good results from that uh in the returns from their investments. So the aum of the private credit industry scarcely 15 years ago might have been about a hundred billion uh and we think it's now over $3.5 trillion of assets under management and allocator surveys continue to show that investors are showing still commitment um to allocate further to this sector and I don't know whether any of you yesterday were in the main auditorium when the CEO of Tamasi uh said that at this conference that private credit could very well be the best performing asset class in 2026 on a riskadjusted basis. So, it's definitely still got its supporters, but of course, growth is always going to capture attention and hence the heightened scrutiny uh that we've been reading about. Um, but is some of this negative conjecture in the media particularly merely just a mis a misunderstanding of the market and the risks that are embedded in it?

And while not immune to economic and credit cycles, we strongly believe that the private credit industry to be very resilient in the face of these concerns. And we do recognize that detailed information um has not always been readily available in some sectors of the private credit market. And that's why we at AMA and the alternative credit cancer, our affiliation, have been conducting our own research over the past 10 years. And shortly my colleague Erie Croll is going to take you through our latest findings of the publication um that we've released just today. Throughout the afternoon, we've got six panels um for those of you who can stay for all of them with highly respected leaders in the private credit industry.

Um give you a flavor of these in in we're going to examine the risk to financial stability, the ongoing value of private credit um versus the more liquid public credit markets, the opportunities beyond just direct corporate lending that's going to include infrastructure and assetbased lending. uh the growing involvement of the wealth management and retail channels where AI fits in and then finally we'll be looking in the final session of the day the blurring of that line that has always existed between private credit and the broadly syndicated loan market. So lots to get through. I hope you enjoy it. Uh never in my view has there been a more important time to get some levelheaded discussions going and answers on what is really going on in this sector especially with all the noise that is currently surrounding it.

So with that enjoy the afternoon and thank you