This week, Cadwalader had the pleasure of hosting students from Fordham University for an engaging introduction to the world of fund finance.
Last week, members of Cadwalader’s fund finance and securitization teams traveled to New Orleans for the ABA Business Law Section Spring Meeting.
Net asset value facility documentation, at least in the context of private equity, has evolved to a large extent on the assumption that borrower funds will usually execute transactions in cash - paying cash on completion for assets acquired, and similarly disposing of assets for cash. The broad drafting assumption has also typically been that distributions by fund borrowers to their investors will almost always be made in cash. However, these assumptions are not always borne out in practice.
Right after Patrick Calves wrote about “continued momentum in the secondaries market, supported by both cyclical and structural tailwinds” in last week’s FFF, Yale University’s plans to sell up to $6 billion is dominating private equity news this week.
As reported in The Lawyer today, Cadwalader has represented Barings (as investor) and Citibank (as agent) on a market-leading structured funding transaction for Coller to broaden fundraising for Coller's investments in private market secondaries.
We are now more than a full quarter into 2025, and it has been a very busy start to the year for the CWT fund finance practice, thanks in part to a busy quarter for secondaries fund finance deals. This is on the back of an important year for the product. The private equity secondaries market continued its steady evolution in 2024 in a way that was both familiar and transformative. Familiar, because the themes of recent years—liquidity constraints, innovation in deal structures and the rise of GP-leds—continue to dominate conversations. Transformative, because the numbers and trends coming out of 2024 suggest that secondaries are no longer just a reactive asset class. These trends have continued through the first quarter of 2025. Once viewed as a niche liquidity solution, secondaries have now become a proactive strategy in their own right, as secondaries funds represent some of the largest fund launches in recent years and secondaries products are no longer used just to manage exposures but a critical asset class used to pursue strategic opportunities across market cycles.
Join fund finance partners Patrick Calves and Leah Edelboim, and securitization partner Skyler Walker, who will be speaking at the ABA Business Law Spring meeting taking place April 24th - 26th in New Orleans.