Sponsor Finance vs. Leveraged Finance

I am trying to wrap my head around the difference between Sponsor Finance and Leveraged Finance. From my vantage point it seems that Sponsor Finance is generally smaller transactions where purely bank debt is used and Leveraged Finance works on the larger transactions that require other debt products such as high yield bonds. If someone could provide some confirmation or direction on this, it would be much appreciated.

9 Comments
 

Just depends on how each individual bank breaks it up really. Don't think what you posted above is accurate for any firms I know of.

 

From my experience, financial sponsors groups are responsible for "covering" a particular set of sponsors, so they spend a lot of time coming up with ideas they constantly pitch to the various buyout shops.

Lev fin is primarily concerned with placing debt for deals that are live or on tap. So generally if you have a choice between the two groups, lev fin is the way to go. Of course this was back in '06 - '08 for me, so times could have changed.

 

This may just be me, but would it not make sense to avoid FSG and LevFin at all costs at the moment? Lets be honest, the deal flow is going to be crap and I know that one bank has merged the two groups together.

 

Depends on the size of the deals your bank deals with. MM groups still have some deal flow (not a lot but some). Its hard to predict what the deal flow for a certain group will be like a year or two from now. Go where your interest is at, you will like your job a lot better. That being said, if I were choosing right now I would most likely avoid those two groups

 

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