The BSL and Private Credit Convergence Zone, An Evolving Landscape

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Stewart: My name is Stewart Foley. I'll be your host. And today we're talking about the increasingly blurry line between broadly syndicated loans and private credit, and what that convergence means for insurance investors. My guest today is Taylor Boswell, who's the Head of Credit Origination and Research at AGL Credit. He has spent his career in corporate credit. Prior to joining AGL, he was a partner at Carlyle where he served as Head of Direct Lending and Chief Investment Officer of Direct Lending. Before that, he held a senior credit investment role at Apollo and also at Perella Weinberg. And earlier in his career, he was with Providence Equity Partners and Deutsche Bank. You have a very illustrious career, Taylor. Welcome to the show.

Taylor: Oh, it's a pleasure to be here with you, and thank you for giving us the opportunity to share our perspectives with you and your audience.

Stewart: Yeah, it's good. I mean, it's an educational podcast, so this is good. We've talked a little bit. There's been some discussion about this topic, even dating back. I remember I was sitting in Eric Kirsch's office when he was still at Aflac, and he said at that point that he thought private credit would become larger than public credit, which is really interesting. When he said it, it has been years ago. I was like, "Wow, that's out there." And it turns out that we're watching that happen.

So before we get going though, there's always a little bit of “get to know you” on this show. So where'd you grow up and what's a fun fact about you that your colleagues would be interested to know?

Taylor: Yeah, happily. So I grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio, born and raised, and came east for college and stayed east. I'd like to believe that today I'm still six parts Ohio and four parts New York, but I probably speak a little faster than I used to, having been here now for 25 or so years. But I always have really strong ties and affinity for the town that I grew up in, a great town, still a diehard Reds and Bengals fan.

And your question about fun facts about me, maybe not so fun, but interesting. I've only had one cup of coffee in my entire life, and I was awake for, like, three days. And every time I tell somebody in our industry that, they look at me like I have two heads. How'd you get through the last 25 years without a little extra help? But I’ve been able to manage thus far.

Stewart: All right. So are you a tea guy then or no?

Taylor: No, not really. I’ve got nothing against it, I just never got in the habit. But when I had that one, it was amazing. I see the appeal clearly!

Stewart: That's okay. All right. So let's just start with this. For those who may not be familiar, can you give us the 30,000-foot view of AGL Credit?

Taylor: Yeah, very, very happily. So AGL is a specialist corporate credit manager. We have two pretty simple objectives. Number one is to be the best corporate credit manager in the marketplace. Number two is to work in partnership with sophisticated, scaled global investing organizations. And those really are the two things that define us and what we seek to do day-to-day. This has allowed us to develop a very nice capability and a nice position in the market. So today we run $25 billion of AUM on behalf of a number of large sophisticated institutions, almost all of that money in customized solutions and applications. Our founder, Peter Gleysteen, has 50 years of experience in the corporate credit markets and is one of the modern founders of the leveraged finance markets, I would suggest. He has developed over the course of his career a number of investment techniques, models, and most importantly, portfolio diversification strategies that we think are quite distinctive and differentiated and allowed us to have good investment success on behalf of those partners over time.

I'd be remiss not to mention some of our large shareholders. The A, the G, and the L, they stand for something. The G of course is Peter, our CEO and founder. The A is the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, and the L is for Thomas H. Lee, and now his estate, two investors who joined Peter at the founding of the firm and have been very important parts of our growth and evolution over time.

Stewart: Super helpful. So AGL talks about a convergence zone between traditional broadly syndicated loans, which the slang for that is BSL. And just for people who are listening to our podcast who may not be neck deep in this, we try to make sure that folks know what these mean. There's an alphabet soup of acronyms out there. But you talk about this convergence zone between BSLs and private credit direct lending. Can you talk a little bit about what you mean when you say convergence zone and why is it emerging now?

Taylor: Yes. I can happily do that. And the point of context I would provide in advance of that is a lot of these delineations, markers, and acronyms were created in the financing markets by financial institutions, but borrowers just want to access the best fit capital for them. And so it's really important when we're having this conversation to remember that in all lending transactions, there's a lender and a borrower, not just an asset manager managing capital on behalf of clients. And so it's really important to keep that framing and respect that as you think about the evolution of this market. Because when we come to the definition of convergence zone, I think a critical perspective that sometimes is lost in the mix is on the other side of this is a borrower and that borrower wants to secure the best possible financing for them. And they really don't care that much which market it comes from.

And increasingly those borrowers are looking to see and execute in multiple markets over different points in their life cycle based on their needs. And that's really what drives convergence. It's not happening at the asset manager level, it's not happening at the limited partner level, it's happening at the borrower level as these sophisticated organizations seek to optimize for their own purposes. So I think that is a really important point to remember through this whole conversation that sometimes is lost.

Now coming to your specific question about convergence zone, narrowly defined, the place where a lot of this convergence is happening most actively is what traditionally would've been the world of corporate cash flow-oriented borrowers, where large borrowers historically might've accessed bank lending or broadly syndicated loan markets or high-yield markets or, to the extent they have the rating, the investment-grade corporate credit markets.

Of course, everyone here has heard the story and understands the growth of direct lending capabilities over that time, and the growth of direct lenders' capability and scale of capital has pushed them into larger borrowers and an ecosystem that can choose to finance in those traditional leveraged finance markets or the private credit market. And so that convergence zone can roughly be defined in this space as borrowers with north of $75 million of EBITDA and as high as multiple hundred millions of EBITDA that would be deemed creditworthy and able to transact in both markets. So it's a large market. To your prior point, directionally, the broadly syndicated loan market is $1.5 trillion and the direct lending and private credit markets are approaching or maybe just exceeding that scale, plus the high-yield market on top of that. These are large markets that are increasingly existing in an interconnected ecosystem as borrowers want to see and execute across multiple markets.

Stewart: This just occurred to me. So given the size that you're talking about, $75 million and up, those are large companies or fairly large. I mean, listen, I'm an entrepreneur, so large to me is like if you get $5 million in EBITDA, to me you're killing it. But at the end of the day, there are folks out there that are worried about like, "Gee, it's been a while since we've had a cycle." Are the larger borrowers better, and maybe you can't make a blanket statement here, but are the larger borrowers in better position to weather that sort of credit cycle than smaller carriers, or does that enter into the equation?

Taylor: Yeah, I mean it's obviously a super complex question and often clarified by just looking at an individual borrower relative to another, as opposed to on a market-wide basis. I do think we think there are great deals to do in all credit markets, but we do think the large market offers real through-cycle investment value. I think it's just objectively true that, all else equal, you prefer a larger borrower to a smaller borrower. That larger borrower is going to have a more consequential market position. It's going to have more diversification, less redundancy within its business, all sorts of very positive attributes. The question of course is, is that all else equal the case? And at different points in the cycle, you may see relative value moving from small to mid to large borrower or very large borrower. But through the cycle, you're going to find great individual opportunities in each of those markets just the same.

We believe that the slight trade-offs that you need to make in terms of leverage and terms to access larger borrowers are more than offset by the incremental improvement in losses on a through-cycle basis. And frankly, in the private markets, the pricing differentials from large borrower to small borrower tend to be much flatter than you might otherwise think. And so we like that segment of the market through cycle, but we're not here to say bad things about other segments of the market. There's great investing to do everywhere. We're principally here because our firm's capabilities are best oriented to assess those and our partnership with Barclays, which we'll talk more about over the course of this conversation, gives us further competitive advantage to deploy into this corner of the market. Because the most important thing is having sustainable competitive advantage in admittedly competitive markets, as all financial investment markets essentially are at this point in the cycle.

And so we're here because we believe we have competitive advantage here for a couple of reasons, and also we like it from a through-cycle investment perspective.

Stewart: Yeah, the through cycle, that's an interesting term. I've not heard that term before, and I think that's a really interesting concept of a through-cycle outcome.

Taylor: And critical.

Stewart: No, no, right.

Taylor: One of the things that credit investors and managers tend to experience is that returns can be quite flat and group. So if you take a generic five-year cycle, you're not going to see a lot of differentiation of outcomes in four out of the five years, but boy, does that fifth year really matter. And that's where the through-cycle concept becomes really important because that's when you realize exactly how many credit costs were incurred underneath the spread that you incurred. It's that net credit spread. You come to these credit markets to access credit risk, and that's the difference between what the contractual returns are stated in your loan documents less your ultimate realized losses. And so you have to be thinking through cycle, you have to be reasonable about what long-term expected losses are in your asset class in addition to just trying to make great individual loans.

Stewart: Yeah. And I think too, I think a lot of people come on, they talk about, “We're better than average underwriting.” Well, not everybody's better than average. We know that. And then it's like our underwriting, our underwriting, our distribution or our sourcing, blah, blah, blah. But really, and somebody made this point, portfolio management after you own it is really important here. Trying to early understand there's a crack in the foundation before the building falls over. It seems like that's talked about less than the underwriting process or the source of deals.

Taylor: Yeah. So we're investors here first and foremost, and I think your observation is correct because a lot of the industry has been, for whatever extraneous factors, more deployment driven. And obviously that comes downstream of a bunch of growth and focus on growth and the like. But I will absolutely agree with your statement around portfolio management, which is there's a lot you can do in private portfolios to preserve your investor's outcomes after you've made the loan. And that's really critical action. But I'll also raise that a level because I think that the private markets have changed a lot in the last 15 years that I've been pretty much exclusively focused on them. And the investment techniques that are required to be successful today naturally are different as those markets have changed. And so we actually think portfolio construction is the attribute that is probably most underinvested in the legacy private markets relative to what it should be.

Of course, you used to have private markets that were characterized by massive inefficiency, and today they're characterized by enormous size and asset selection potential. But if you just take a deployment-oriented mindset, your portfolios will group and follow in ways that you would prefer not as an investor. And so one of the key things we do here at AGL, again, developed downstream of Peter's experience, is apply a very different set of portfolio construction techniques that functionally flatten our exposures and limit intra-portfolio correlation because what really gets you with that through-cycle view is if you haven't appropriately diversified your portfolios. And so yeah, portfolio construction, portfolio management, are critical in an industry that has probably overweighted in its airtime deployment and upfront asset profile.

Stewart: I would tell you that I probably have an equal number of white hairs and dumb questions. So here comes the dumb question for you. So if I'm a CFO of a borrower that is in that $75 million of EBITDA and above and I want to borrow, am I going to go out, am I going to shop public and private at the same time and make that decision? Spreads are as more capital flows into the private credit space, spreads compress, it's just the nature of supply and demand. But how does a borrower decide where they want to go? How does that process work?

Taylor: Yeah, so just a quick point, picking up on your spread compression point, spreads have compressed everywhere. So the reality is that the relative spread available in private credit markets has been much more broadly flat. And this is not limited to broadly syndicated loans or corporate direct lending. You're seeing that across the entire financial ecosystem. That's of course downstream of real rates and macro flows and things like that. So that's really important context to maintain. Now to your question about being that borrower, this is where our relationship with Barclays in private credit really, really helps because what happens is those borrowers have trusted advisors, which is probably a network of three to six banks that their CEO and CFO keep really close. And they use those providers for everyday products like cash management and risk management and hedging all the way out to strategic advice and M&A, inclusive of financing dialogues.

And so you asked the question of does that CFO look at multiple markets? They absolutely should. They really should because they may be at a stage of their life where accessing one or the other market makes more or less sense, and they absolutely should look to get very good execution with the right kind of counterparties for what they do. And so we haven't come to the higher level version of this that walks through why working hand in hand with a bank to approach the private markets is so valuable. But you can imagine that a conversation that starts with trusted advisors earlier in its process that has the opportunity to show you multiple financing options at one time is both competitively advantaged for the investors that serve the capital into that, whether the borrower chooses option A, B, or C, but also to the borrower itself in smoothing its own execution path and achieving the best possible outcome.

So yes, they should be doing that. They increasingly are doing that, and there are benefits to their own shareholders for doing so. And those benefits are not just leverage and price. There's many different attributes of these different financing markets that come into play.

Stewart: And I would assume that some of that is covenants, right? I mean, I assume that not all private credit borrowers have identical sets of covenants and I assume that that's part of, and it's different than price and yield, but an important consideration, I would think.

Taylor: Yeah, that's right. I mean, you're not going to see, for responsible lenders in the performing markets, either liquid or private, you're going to see comprehensive first lien security packages. You're going to see affirmative and negative covenants with some variation across them. And then you're going to see financial maintenance covenants, of course, as an important component of that, that will vary market to market. So there's a lot of important detail in how loans are constructed for that matter, but I would just venture to say to your audience that terms are broadly protective of lenders across these markets, and there's plenty of opportunity to do it right and do it well for lenders and investors into the marketplace.

So I mentioned price, I mentioned leverage, you mentioned terms. There's also meaningful differences in structure. So some markets facilitate the commitment of future capital more readily than other markets, delayed draw term loans and the like, which are very valuable for many borrower types and many investment strategies, especially those that are oriented around new build programs or roll-up M&A or the like that can really differentiate one market versus the other.

In a lot of cases, investors are looking for long-term buy-and-hold lenders. Management teams want long-term buy-and-hold investors in their debt stack to match the nature of funding or preferences of their equity investors. And so some markets can offer different profiles in that respect. So I think there's too much quickness to distill this choice down to “Private credit's going to give you higher price, but more leverage versus BSL that's going to give you lower price, lower leverage.” There really are a lot of factors to go into that choice and a lot of reasons why good borrowers can choose either one on any given day.

Stewart: That's super helpful. So we have an executive council at InsuranceAUM, and occasionally they have given me permission to wear a mock CIO hat. They said I could keep it on for two or three minutes at a time and I'd take it back off. So I'm going to put it on real quick and say, if I'm a CIO, one of the attractions you identified, you just talked about it, is the potential to capture spread associated with private credit lending to larger borrowers that might have stronger businesses and potentially greater resilience. Can you talk to me about how an insurance investor should be thinking about this, the trade-off between the two and what this convergence means for them?

Taylor: Yeah. I mean, it's obviously a continuously evolving topic, and I think you're the person who coined the term “more has changed in the last two years than in the prior 30,” right?

Stewart: That's the truth, too.

Taylor: And I got to tell you, people are repeating that without attribution all over the place as if it's their insight, Stewart, but it's so, so very true. What we encourage people to do is to think about the assets first and the structure second.

So the beautiful part of the leveraged credit markets, the syndicated loan and the private credit market, is it is a really great place to go and isolate credit risk and to do so generally in a floating rate context where you have enough market depth to appropriately portfolio select and portfolio construct. And those are really compelling attributes when laid out against a lot of other asset classes. We do think that there needs to be more of a realistic assessment of through-cycle expected returns out of these asset classes. There's too much marketing noise that articulates virtually zero losses over long periods of time, which on their surface just do not make sense to people because that's not in fact the reality of credit investing. The reality of credit investing is you should always be budgeting for some amount of expected losses and monitoring your performance against that, as well as getting ready for surprises and protecting portfolios with diversification.

So we really like a super healthy and honest conversation about the positive attributes and realistic expectations of the underlying assets as the cornerstone of any conversation with an insurance investor. Now, the world has innovated a wide variety of structures by which insurance investors can access this and other risk. And I've been fortunate and interested along that path to learn a lot about it, going from single asset ratings to IMAs to drawdown CLOs for insurers, to rated feeders, to CFOs, to the list keeps going on and on, and Wall Street is serving them an ever-increasing set of structures from which to do that. And I think the vast majority of that is very, very sound and very useful in an insurance context. So we work actively with our insurance clients and potential clients on a wide variety of those structures with interest because they're very, very effective at delivering increased return at comparable risk across their portfolios.

And you'll know more about this than I will, which is the third piece, which is those organizations increasingly don't have a choice as to whether or not to participate in these markets because there's some very aggressive players that are utilizing that excess expected investment return actively and it impacts the ability to source liabilities and funding in your marketplace. And so we are positioning ourselves in this marketplace as a deeply knowledgeable expert in the assets who can deploy sophisticated structuring against those assets and doesn't have a dog in the fight, is not conflicted in the world of competing for insurance liabilities and the like.

Because honestly, these concepts of competition, co-opetition, et cetera, are not limited to the insurance markets. We see the same thing in the banking ecosystem with large asset managers. We're coming back to our partnership with Barclays. They have fantastic clients and relationships in complex scenarios where sometimes they compete with and sometimes they offer services to, and we're very, very happy to be their partner helping them deliver a service effectively to their clients that otherwise might be harder to serve off a traditional bank balance sheet.

Stewart: Yeah, it's super helpful. I will say this, I'm close friends with a person who is a former CIO at a very large, well-known insurance company, and he refers to folks as the “folded armed observer.” And there were a boatload, and when I worked prior as a PM, "Well, this is the way we've always done it, and we don't need to do that," and blah, blah, blah, blah. And private credit, the allocation to private assets, there is a 90 basis point gap between the return profile of small carriers that don't have access to private assets and large carriers that do. So there are some folks who are working on solutions to try and get access there, but the sophistication level, most of those carriers below $1 billion don't have a dedicated CIO, and it's difficult to hire and retain talent that is well versed in these markets at places that are so small and often remote.

So I think your point's very well taken. There's a tremendous performance advantage that a lot of large carriers have benefited from by being in these markets. You point out this, private credit tremendously benefited from bank retrenchment following the GFC. We all know that and banks have responded, but it makes a lot of sense to me that a bank originator and a private credit asset manager being together makes a lot of sense because, I mean, we've seen this movie in residential mortgages for a while. Can you talk a little bit about the relationship between banks and private credit and how it's evolving?

Taylor: Yeah, no, very, very happily. It's a critical aspect of what we do and a really important part of what we perceive to be our competitive advantage in the private credit markets. So I do think just a little step back perspective is useful here, which is people like me coming out of the GFC who were involved in the private markets ran around for 10-plus years saying, "Isn't this great? We get to do this because the banks aren't here." And that statement implied very clearly that if they were, they'd be very good at it. And there were some reasons why they weren't active, some of which were downstream of regulation, which on the margin may be moving back the other way now a little bit, and some of which were related to private credit hadn't grown up to a place that it was really important to the most important clients of those banks.

But things have clearly changed in the last five years. You will observe that there probably have been something like 20 different announcements of different bank initiatives in private credit, whether in partnership with asset managers or directly over the last half a decade. And we feel very lucky here at AGL to, one, have been very early on the front end of that trend, but also to have secured what we consider to be the absolute best partner for the assets that we're involved in, which is Barclays Bank, the old Lehman Brothers business, which is a fantastic leveraged finance franchise. And we'll tell you more about that relationship in a second. But if you go back three, four, five years, a lot of the incumbent asset managers would've said, "Hey, that bank thing is never going to work in our markets." And frankly, in the last couple of years, you see some of those large asset managers setting up their own partnerships with banks.

And I think that acknowledges very clearly that these organizations are very substantial, very capable, and very competitive participants and potential participants, both in these markets directly and around them. Now, the other piece of context around this is we all have to acknowledge, as I said before, the changing nature of the private credit markets, and obviously not only their increased size, scale, and applicability, but the increased competition in those markets. And so you come back to that borrower and the decision that a CFO has to make. They have the ability to source multiple financing proposals across multiple markets. And many of those proposals will be at acceptable or competitive prices. So they really are in a position now to demand more from their lenders than just capital. And this is where the bank partnership model that we deploy becomes very effective because that panoply of services that are delivered off a bank is highly differentiated as compared to most private credit or direct lenders that are monoline providers of a single financing solution.

So as soon as you're integrating that financing solution in with all these other products and services, you just have a better product to offer to borrowers. And that is a great thing for our investors because having a better product is what allows you to both see more investments, but also to consistently choose the best ones out of that pipeline without other repercussions to future access to deals, which is a real topic for businesses that are under-originated. And so you can imagine how in our partnership with Barclays, which is a long-term arrangement where we are exclusive partners for the delivery of private credit to their banking customers, one that's very integrated in its operation, you can imagine how that will generate a significant pool of opportunities having several hundred bankers as opposed to several dozen, at most, originators at most large firms out looking for opportunities.

You can see how it would naturally attach earlier in deal life cycles, which delivers a bunch of meaningful advantages in terms of information, access, time, et cetera, to investors. And then that last piece that I just described is at the end of the day, if you can choose to just take money from someone who offers money and money alone or money from someone who offers strategic advice and hedging services, you're probably going to choose the latter, not the former with more regularity. So it's a really powerful model. We've had great success with it in our first couple of years of investing. We see other people looking to increasingly deploy it in these partnership formats in this market and other markets. And we're not suggesting that Rome will be built in a day, but we are suggesting that there's a meaningful change in the competitive dynamics of the private credit markets that is underway with the shift.

Stewart: It's really interesting. We do a call about once a quarter with a CIO group and we don't publicize it. I mean, we don't advertise it. It's not open to anybody. It's just they want to talk to each other. And one of the things, there's been a tremendous amount of growth in private credit. There's investors that are concerned about potential areas of stress, and they were talking about software exposure. They want to know, “To what extent am I exposed to AI?” And there was a comment made that was some version of, what if this doesn't work? Now I would argue, and I do think, and I know a lot of my contemporaries are much lower usage of AI than a whole bunch of other people, and the insurance industry is notorious and well-deserved reputation of being slow to move. And so there is a lot of AI disruption.

There is a lot of money that has gone into data centers and AI infrastructure and so on and so forth. How do I get my arms around some of these exposures that if I made an investment two, three years ago, the landscape looks different than it did when I made the investment? So what does good underwriting look like in this environment?

Taylor: Yep. Well, it's obviously one of the most important investment questions in front of all markets. And I think that for your listeners thinking about how they work with their managers, it's a really productive place to go to understand how people organize themselves against this at different points in time. And so said differently, I have a lot more sympathy for people that made an AI investment mistake six years ago than one that made it a year and a half ago. Because one of the things we really try hard to do is identify what will be the consequential investment topics of 12 to 36 months from now. The crystal ball gets really hard to see after about two and a half years, but you can start to frame potential risks reliably in that window. So I don't know exactly what everybody did, but I know what we did here at AGL, which was in the first quarter of 2025, we said, wait a minute, we got to stop and talk about this.

We pulled all of our senior investors together in a long focused process driven by real research to identify, to assess whether or not we thought we could confidently invest into this risk profile on a go-forward basis. And that process has resulted in us being, we think, very well positioned against these risks. Now importantly, we didn't say “no software.” We actually assessed that we thought we could pick software credits well through that period because we believe AI is way bigger than software, number one — way bigger. Which is incremental risk. But number two, we believe that there will be far more opportunity for incumbent borrowers to capitalize on this technology going forward than others. And so basically, as we've thought about that investment risk over the last couple of years very, very deeply and developed methodologies and implementations to position portfolios around it, and we've thought about what's the core capability of the technology, how is it being commercialized, and who's going to get the money and the margin out of all this?

And the best thing that's happened for all of us is it looks like there's going to be a really competitive world of model providers that will ensure other businesses have the opportunity to bid those services competitively and continue to earn their margin. So we're actually pretty constructive about the long-term prospects, but we know we have critical judgments we need to make about whether or not individual companies are executing their strategies and individual management teams are executing their strategies effectively into this ecosystem. So step back, sorry, that was a little AGL talk on how we've been doing it, but we're really pleased with where we are. Our view is that it's very difficult to assess monetization levels for a lot of these hard assets that are being put in place and whether that's their effective lifespan or the price at which they realize for lying ahead of some future technology.

But we're actually really constructive on volumes and how meaningfully transformative these technologies can be for many, many businesses. And so I think that that's the core of our view. And I think AI is very scary when it's considered in the context of are we going to have the doom scenario or are we going to have global nirvana? But when you actually bring it down, as I said earlier, when you bring it down to an individual borrower, how do their customers think? How are they positioning their cost structure? What do their products and services look like? That really clarifies a lot of decisions meaningfully, I find. And so we've concluded that we can invest effectively into this. We made that decision not on the back of the market realizing it, but a year ahead of time. And what we see is a lot of really interesting opportunities because there is a pretty big fear and uncertainty factor generally in the market, which is allowing returns per unit of risk to gap and differentiate across a bunch of different ecosystems. So I think, Stewart, that generally went where you wanted me to go on that question.

Stewart: Yeah, it did.

Taylor: Yeah. That’s what we've been thinking about.

Stewart: So I'll give you another one. It is the industrial revolution of the mind. And what I say to people is, and this is not mine, but I heard somebody say this, you're based in New York. If you were going to fly to LA and you went out to JFK or LaGuardia and all the planes look like giant birds and they had these giant long wings, and as you looked out on the runway, these things were flapping like wild to get up in the air and the things going up and down and up and down like a bird does. And you go, how excited would you be to get on that thing? And the answer is not so much. We've invented a better way to fly than a bird. We've got planes that are way faster, can go way farther, have way better technology.

And that's what this is. This is a better way to think. And it is undeniably powerful. Where it's going, I don't know. Will it take over the world? Probably, but it is really amazing to watch it develop right now. So I really have enjoyed having you on, Taylor. It's been a great education on the blurring of the lines between BSL and private credit. A lot of great content here and really appreciate it. I got one fun one for you on the way out the door, if you're game.

Taylor: It's been a pleasure for me too. Let's do it.

Stewart: All right, here we go. So describe your best and/or fantasy dinner. Where is it? What are you having? What are you drinking? Give it to me. If it's one that you had or one that you'd like to have, give us your best dinner.

Taylor: Oh my gosh. Okay. I think dinner is often defined by the company.

Stewart: Absolutely. Absolutely.

Taylor: I'm going to make a necessary requirement, but any dinner with my wife is the best dinner I can possibly imagine, Stewart. But if it can't be that, I'm a lover of history and I really love these ideas about people where history changed in the wake of their action. And I love thinking about how much of that was your personal ambition versus your belief that drove that. How much of that was intentional versus unintentional? To what extent was that driven by some other compromise you had to make in them? It's messy down there, right? And when we read all these history books, I think we miss a lot of the mess. And so I'd love to sit at that table with people like Caesar Augustus and what was that really like? When you were making those decisions, were you thinking about reshaping the Western world for several centuries thereafter? Or Mao Zedong. Look at what happened. How much of this is what you were after and how much of this varies from what you're at? I think that'd be a cool dinner to sit there. You probably need some truth serum applied to everybody, but you'd learn a lot. You put a couple of those types together and you might also be very interested to see what they think of each other too. So that's something I think about.

Stewart: All right. That's super cool. What's your wife's name?

Taylor: Lizzie.

Stewart: Lizzie? Yes. You made the podcast. Here we are. All right, cool.

Taylor: We just burned one of her 15 minutes of fame. Oh no.

Stewart: No, that's good stuff. We've been joined today by Taylor Boswell, head of Credit Origination and Research at AGL Credit. Taylor, thanks so much for taking the time.

Taylor: Hey Stewart, appreciate it. Thanks to you and your listeners. It's been fun.

Stewart: Our pleasure. Thanks for listening. If you like what we do, please rate us and review us wherever you listen to this show. You can also watch us. This is a video podcast on YouTube at InsuranceAUM Community. My name's Stewart Foley. I've been your host and we look forward to seeing you next time on the InsuranceAUM Podcast.

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AGL Credit Management LLC (“AGL”) is a corporate credit specialist for investors and borrowers through its differentiated approach to sourcing, originating, investing in and managing corporate credit assets.

AGL offers investment strategies and financing solutions including broadly syndicated loans (BSL) and Private Credit / Direct Lending (PC/DL). With over $25 billion in assets under management, AGL’s highly experienced and client-focused team is dedicated to achieving the objectives of long-term investors and borrowers through its differentiated approach to sourcing, creating and managing corporate credit. AGL benefits from being an aligned non-competitive partner to leading banks that have the largest sourcing footprints and many levels of credit information plus market and industry expertise.
 

AGL Credit Management LLC
535 Madison Avenue, 24th Floor
New York, NY 10022
 

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