27 Comments
 

It's known in the industry that the culture is pretty bad especially around a specific MD in the NPL team, with some folks leaving due to the excessive stress.

 

There are four teams as far as I'm aware. Distressed, Industry Research (HY), Direct Lending, NPLs. 

NPLs team has a terrible reputation. Top-down issue, crazy MD. But this is the case for most equivalent NPLs teams within credit arms of PE shops. They tend to churn grads - hiring laterally is tough. There are a few examples of high quality exits from this team if you're willing to put up with a couple of years of torment.


The rest of the teams are pretty good culturally.

 

Worked few years for him.

Fabio just wants the team to perform at its best and to do so he is very demanding. For sure with him you will touch the best underwriting practice in the industry (that is recognised in the market).

Also with his team he has a very meritocratic approach: work hard, play hard.

 

very tedious deals, ie in each portfolio you have thousands of loans, which involve a lot of analysis, so hours are very long, and modeling can be complex.

So the nature of the business makes it prone to long hours etc, but then it seems that maybe seniors tend to be harder than in other divisions.. maybe you need to be though to thrive in that industry haha

ps This is what I have been told, don't have first hand NPL experience, so if anyone can verify it / correct it / add more colour, it'd be great

 

Not to highjack the thread, but was curious what the culture & comp on the direct lending team is like? Are they all in NYC?

 

They basically underwrite portfolios of Real estate and NPLs from banks or other funds/AMs. The job will be pretty much building an excel model pricing those loans and real estate. A big model with a lot of assumptions both on the secured side (loans with collateral or assets that are already in the portfolio, also called REOs), and unsecured side (loans that don't have a collateral). 

These transactions are usually introduced to Bain Cap and other funds via an external company that helps the bank or fund arranging the data of the portfolio, marketing etc. (e.g. Alantra). Once the company sends out the investment memorandum, the funds decide if they are interested in the transaction or not. That's when all the work other monkeys talk about in previous comments starts, as these portfolios have a lot of data points. Not only you have to analyse the data, but you also have to make sure that the datatapes are correct... Needless to say that you have a short period of time to price the portfolio. 

 

To add more color on NPLs - DK, Elliott, Apollo have all also been looking at the space/buying portfolios. Look at all the greek/spanish/italian banks offloading portfolio of NPLs - some of these deals were 2bn deals in one go. 
UBS has done few sellsides in the space from what I know. EY used to be really good at doing some structuring advisory for these.

 

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