Fund Finance Career Opportunities
I currently am a senior in college and going to be working in fund finance. Was wondering if anyone could answer a few questions to help me out.
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What are the exit opportunities / What transferrable skills will I gain? Where I am working deals mostly with PE secondaries. I didn't know if you are able to transition to an investor role at these funds or even at a private credit shop.
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What is the comp? I know it sounds dumb to worry about this, but I am wondering what the progression looks like throughout your career.
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Am I pigeonholing myself? It is early into my career so it is tough to truly pigeonhole myself, but just wanted to make sure that I wasn't going to be doing that right out of school. I know Fund Finance is niche, but don't know how much
Any advice is appreciated.
I didn't work in fund finance, but I did intern at a large balance-sheet bank that has a strong fund finance team. Spoke with some people there a bunch of times since they sat close by. Here's my impression of answers to the above.
1. Most of the skills you'll gain would be related to credit and understanding the IG syndication processes. You'd also get a decently strong understanding of fund structures, but you aren't going to be working on any event-driven financings and thus won't be doing a ton (if any) of financial modeling. With that, I don't know if exits would be that strong outside of moving internally to a corporate banking role or potentially other lending-related desks like DCM or LevFin, and externally to some secondary funds.
2. Comp is probably below what IB makes, but I think the WLB would be pretty good since they'd be done at like 8-9 PM at the latest each day, most days before that, so I'd guess around 50-60 hours a week. Would be the definition of a nice "cushy" job where you don't need to sweat a lot but you're still making six figures.
3. Depends on what you think you might want to do. If you're thinking of trying to go for traditional exits that IB has like PE or corporate development, yes, you're probably pigeonholing yourself and would probably need an MBA to get something like that. Seems like a lot of people who do fund finance tend to stay in fund finance since it is a good value proposition long-term, but it honestly doesn't seem like the best place to start out of undergrad unless you don't have a ton of other options.
I don’t work in fund finance but in secondaries, so there’s a lot of adjacency.
“Fund Finance” is a big market which is overwhelmingly comprised of ~1tn of subscription facilities, like 90-95%+ I would guess. Those facilities are pretty light work on credit underwriting in my experience, more about qualitatively analyzing look through LP profile and institutional % and tending to your sponsor relationships.
There is a small but growing segment of the market focused on more esoteric lending against individual assets or groups of assets, fund portfolios, secondary transaction SPVs, private fund securitizations etc. but I caution you that I get the sense that a ton of parties talk about those deals but don’t actually do them. From my perspective the significant deals in this space from a scale and complexity standpoint are done by a comparatively small group of lenders wielding big institutional balance sheets. Most banks, while checking the balance sheet box, do not really play outside the subscription facility space, except maybe to the extent they participate in the market for secondary transaction leverage.
my guess is you’ll learn a bit about waterfall modeling in your chair, maybe fund modeling (which is also waterfall modeling) but not much about “asset level” considerations.
i just PM’ed you
lol I was expecting a Wells banker on this. Good team, you have.
curious to hear or if u can pm if you have insights – joining this group soon
Curious on some insight on FF as I am interviewing currently. A pm would be greatly appreciated.
I am applying to WF FFG and would love to chat if you don’t mind!
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