FT Letter: Be assured, retail money is a footnote to private credit
In a letter to the Financial Times, Zachary Lewy champions private credit, highlighting its resilience in the face of macro shocks, the depth of institutional capital behind it and, in Arrow’s case, the specialised street-level underwriting expertise that protects and grows value through the cycle.
Gillian Tett (Opinion, July 26) warns that private credit might be the next accident waiting to happen and that “anyone entering the private credit dance should be warned”.
From the vantage point of someone who has spent two decades investing in this market, the picture looks rather different. First, the asset class has weathered every recent macroeconomic and geopolitical storm. When public credit collapsed in 2008-09 during the pandemic, and again in the rate shock of 2022, private credit kept paying interest. Floating-rate structures and hands-on workouts protect value and speed recoveries.
Second, its rapid growth is anything but reckless. Banks stepped back after the global financial crisis; long-term investors such as insurers, pension funds and sovereign wealth funds stepped forward. Their capital is patient, and their due diligence exhaustive. At Arrow, for instance, we have 25 local platforms that underwrite deals, street by street and business by business — work that cannot be outsourced to a Bloomberg terminal.
Read Zach’s full letter here
Zach Lewy
CEO, CIO, Fund Principal
Zach has more than 25 years of executive experience in investment management and asset servicing. He founded Arrow Global in 2005 and has since led the business as Group CEO and CIO, transforming it into a leading Pan-European investment manager specialising in private credit and real estate. Under Zach’s leadership, Arrow manages more than €110 billion of serviced assets across Western Europe and generates alpha across alternative asset classes, including opportunistic credit, real estate, and lending.
Zach has supervised over 3,000 deals at Arrow and plays a key role as lead Principal in Arrow’s fund manager. Prior to founding Arrow, he was an Officer of Sallie Mae, a Director at Vertex (the BPO division of United Utilities), and a Founder and Executive Director of 7C (a U.K. BPO company acquired by Vertex). He has also served as Chair of the U.K. Debt Buyers Association and the Chair of SCOR. In 2010, he was named an Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year.
Zach graduated from Princeton University with a BA in Economics with Honours and a Certificate in Applied and Computational Mathematics with Honours.