This episode is sponsored by Dawson Partners, StepStone Group and Davis Polk

Ongoing uncertainty within private markets over the past year has helped fuel interest in credit secondaries.

Institutions have turned to private credit looking for relatively stable returns. Furthermore, managers and LPs are turning to the secondaries market for liquidity as they look to manage their own portfolios.

“Those have dovetailed together to create this tailwind behind private credit secondaries,” Davis Polk partner Sijia Cai said on the latest edition of Secondaries Investor’s Second Thoughts podcast. “It has the best of both worlds in that it's offering liquidity solution to people in a way that also mimics and has the stability and the yield and the returns of private credit.”

In this episode, Secondaries Investor’s editor Madeleine Farman is joined by Dawson Partners’ Yann Robard, StepStone Group’s John Bohill and Davis Polk’s Sijia Cai. They explore how the private credit secondaries market has evolved, the fundamental differences as compared to private equity secondaries and what is driving the surge in GP-led credit secondary transactions.

They also discuss pricing, investor appetite and what will define success for managers operating in this rapidly growing segment of the market.

Secondaries volumes to date in 2026 are ahead of what they were at the same period last year, driven by a lack of distributions, with investors taking advantage of strong prices.

LPs have become even more sophisticated in the past few years. A factor that is aiding their sophistication is the rise of asset class-focused products, offering them the ability to bring portfolios to market that are met with the right cost of capital.

New entrants are coming to the market in earnest. These players represented 16 percent of the $226 billion of deal volume seen last year, compared with just 7 percent of the $114 billion of volume in 2023, according to Evercore's year-end report.

Alongside these developments, secondaries manager M&A continues. This year alone, EQT has agreed to buy Coller Capital for up to $3.7 billion, while KKR agreed to buy sports investing specialist Arctos Partners with plans for a secondaries build out as part of its vision for the future of the combined firms.

Evergreen capital has also emerged as a secondaries market mainstay, according to Evercore's report. Permanent capital funds have raised $46 billion for secondaries to-date with near-term fundraising coming in at $25 billion. A quarter of secondaries buyers have an evergreen fund, with this proportion set to rise in future.

In this episode, Nigel Dawn, global head of Evercore's private capital advisory group, discusses the capitalisation of the secondaries market over the longer term, and how this will change the way Evercore works with the buyside. He also dives into how secondaries market activity will take shape in 2026 at a time where private markets activity is expected to ramp up.

The European secondaries market saw a string of sizeable deals across the course of 2025, with expected growth continued both this year and beyond.

European managers CapVest, Montagu, Norvestor and PAI Partners secured CV-on-CV transactions over the course of last year, with CVC, Inflexion and TDR Capital also securing sizeable CVs, to name just a few. Belgian holding company Groupe Bruxelles Lambert and APG Asset Management also scored large LP-led portfolio deals.

In this episode, editor Madeleine Farman is joined by Gabriel Möllerberg, managing director at Goldman Sachs Asset Management, Lea Lazaric Calvert, a senior managing director at Evercore, and Nik Morandi, senior managing director at Blackstone Strategic Partners.

The group discuss the rise of CV-on-CV transactions in Europe, the nuances around creating alignment given the prevalence of full fund carry waterfalls, the rise of first time sellers in the European secondaries market and expectations for European secondaries activity in 2026.