Rising stars of private debt share their top tips for success
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Three of this year’s rising stars of Private Debt reflect on their careers, how they identified their areas of interest and what their advice would be for the next generation of private credit professionals.
Adam Baghdadi, managing director in the lending team at Arrow Global, Priscilla Schnepper, an investment manager in the private credit team at the European Investment Fund and Catherine Verri, a partner in the investor relations team at Carlyle, share their insights on how to succeed in this industry.
“It’s a risk reward question, and I always feel more comfortable being able to put in the work and structure a deal carefully so I’m very, very, very confident that we won’t lose money. So, I think if people listening have that same “I don’t want to lose money”, “I never want to lose money”, “I really never want to lose money”, but I obviously want to make attractive returns for my investors, then private credit is that intersection between where the work and the structuring can pay off to achieve exactly that.”
“What I would say is, if it’s a brand-new product for you, then you need to get up to speed quickly, to understand how the market works, you need to understand the terms of these instruments, you need to understand their seniority, their ranking, what attractive returns look like.”
“The one big picture learning that I have looking back, in the first 3-5 years of my career is don’t specialise too early, I feel very specialised now, but it happened over a 15-year period. I wouldn’t want to have been nearly as specialised in years 1-5 in my career. You want the flexibility to later figure out what’s interesting at different points in the cycle, and drill down, but early on get as varied an experience as you can.”
Listen to the full podcast here
Adam Baghdadi
Managing Director, Lending
Adam Baghdadi is a Managing Director in the Arrow central investment team focused on lending. He has over 13 years of investment experience in credit, lending and corporate finance.
Previously Adam was a member of the investment team at Sixth Street in London, where he worked across a range of credit and special situation transactions with a focus on hard asset and real estate backed opportunities. Prior to that Adam was an investment analyst at HBK, a global credit-oriented multi-strategy hedge fund, where he worked across a range of corporate and structured credit strategies. Adam started his career at Morgan Stanley in the UK Investment Banking team, where he worked across a range of public M&A, takeover defence and debt and equity capital markets transactions.
Adam holds an MA in Economics and Management (1st class honours) from Oxford University.