Private Credit Firms in Europe Are Now Hiring Like Banks

Private credit is now large enough that the data providers treat it as a permanent part of the financing market. Preqin expects direct lending and related strategies to hold around $4.5 trillion by 2030, within a global alternatives market it forecasts at $32 trillion (Preqin, Private Markets in 2030, October 2025). In April this year, Bloomberg launched a standardised dataset of more than 15,000 private direct loans, covering roughly $1 trillion of deal flow over six years and drawn from BDC filings, deal disclosures and lender reporting (Bloomberg, April 2026).

For hiring, the more telling figure concerns the type of capital. The five largest alternative managers now hold about $1.5 trillion of perpetual capital, close to 40% of their combined assets and up from 35% in 2021 (With Intelligence, Private Credit Outlook 2026, January 2026). A manager that holds a loan indefinitely has to originate it, price it, monitor it, amend it and, if the borrower runs into difficulty, restructure it. Those are the functions a commercial lending bank has always had, and they are now appearing on private credit org charts.

We see this directly in the mandates we run across Europe. In 2026, private credit briefs look less like fund mandates and more like the credit division of a bank. What follows sets out what is driving that across Europe, where demand is concentrated, and what it means for anyone hiring into or out of these teams.

1. Platforms Have Outgrown Their Operating Models

The fundraising data points to consolidation. Direct lending accounted for 53% of private credit fundraising in 2025, down from 59% in 2023, and the number of private credit funds raising capital fell 21% in the first three quarters of 2025 compared with the same period in 2024 (Bloomberg Intelligence, Private Credit Annual Report EOY 2025, Q1 2026). Capital is concentrating in fewer, larger managers running a wider range of strategies.

That changes who gets hired. A $2 billion single strategy fund can run origination through a handful of partners and rely on third parties after signing. A $60 billion platform spanning direct lending, asset based finance, opportunistic credit and a semi liquid wealth vehicle cannot. It needs people in defined functions: underwriting standards, portfolio management, valuations, fund finance and investor reporting.

Two years ago, few European managers had anyone whose sole job was to own underwriting standards separately from deal execution. A growing number of the larger platforms in London and Paris are now recruiting for exactly that role, usually from bank credit risk or leveraged finance teams.

2. Origination Is Becoming a Coverage Business

Private credit provided 87% of buyout financing in the first half of 2024, up from 61% in 2019 (Bloomberg Intelligence, Private Credit Outlook 2025, December 2024). Lenders won that share on relationships and speed. Holding on to it, with dozens of lenders competing for the same sponsors, depends on systematic coverage, which banks have practised for decades.

Europe is where this is moving fastest. European private credit fundraising reached $65 billion in the first nine months of 2025, already 14% above the $57 billion raised in the whole of 2024, and Europe accounted for 35% of global private debt fundraising over that period (With Intelligence, Private Credit Outlook 2026, January 2026). That capital has to be deployed and deploying it in Europe is harder than in the US.

The European market is split across jurisdictions, languages and legal systems, and the sponsor community in each country is small and well networked. A lender entering the French, German or Nordic mid market without local relationships starts well behind those who already have them. Language matters too: in Paris, a coverage banker who cannot run a sponsor meeting in French is at a clear disadvantage, however strong their deal record. We see it all the time when hiring for these kinds of firms. Fluent French is often a requirement rather than a bonus.

The most sought after originators are therefore rarely the ones with the longest deal lists. They are the leveraged finance and sponsor coverage bankers whom sponsors in a given market already call first or the ones they call back first. When we assess candidates for these roles, the question is less whether someone has closed unitranche deals and more which sponsors would take their call.

3. Portfolio Monitoring Has Been Understaffed

Underwriting has always attracted the attention and the carry. Monitoring is where losses are prevented, yet it is the function private credit invested in least during its growth.

The stress data explains why that is now changing. The headline private credit default rate has been below 2% for several years, but once selective defaults and liability management exercises are included, the rate is closer to 5%. Around 40% of private credit borrowers now have negative free cash flow, compared with 25% in 2021, and payment in kind income averages 8% of investment income across public BDCs (With Intelligence, Private Credit Outlook 2026, January 2026, citing IMF data).

None of this amounts to a crisis, but it does create a steady flow of amendments, covenant resets, PIK toggles and sponsor negotiations that someone must handle. The industry knows it. In a September 2025 Bloomberg Intelligence survey of 140 market participants, 24% named deteriorating credit quality as a top risk to growth, compared with 11% for bank competition (Bloomberg Intelligence, Private Credit Annual Report EOY 2025, Q1 2026).

Managers are more concerned about their own portfolios than about the banks, and their hiring reflects that. Portfolio management, valuations and asset management roles now sit alongside origination in the European mandates we see, and they are increasingly filled at VP and director level rather than by junior analysts.

4. Workout Experience Is the Scarcest Skill in Europe

The hardest profile to find is restructuring and special situations experience gained inside a lender rather than at an advisory firm. People don’t like to shout about things that have gone wrong.

Roughly 75% of lenders and 64% of fund managers expect deployment to increase over the next twelve months (Bloomberg Intelligence, Private Credit Annual Report EOY 2025, Q1 2026). A growing book with a true default rate near 5% produces a steady workout pipeline, and the team to manage it needs to be in place before the first borrower gets into trouble. Evergreen private credit assets reached $644 billion by 30 June 2025, up 45% year on year, with $520 billion of that in private wealth structures (With Intelligence, Private Credit Outlook 2026, January 2026). Wealth investors bring closer scrutiny, and a manager explaining a restructuring to a distribution network needs people who have been through one.

Europe adds a further complication. Each major jurisdiction has its own restructuring toolkit: the UK restructuring plan, French safeguard and accelerated safeguard proceedings, and the German StaRUG framework all work differently in practice. A lender with borrowers in several countries needs people who know how those processes play out, not just how they read on paper.

Candidates with that experience usually come from bank restructuring groups or from leveraged finance desks that worked through 2009 and 2020. There are few of them, and competition for them is intense.

A Note of Caution

Bank competition ranked second to last among the risks in the Bloomberg Intelligence survey, but banks have been steadily winning back refinancing volume, and the shift in market share is real, though in our view it is unlikely to be permanent. North America also still accounts for 78% of private credit by domicile (Bloomberg Intelligence, Private Credit Annual Report EOY 2025, Q1 2026), so the European build out is at an earlier stage than headline growth suggests. A manager that hires as though every European platform will reach American scale risks paying for capability its portfolio cannot yet support.

There is also a risk in copying the bank model too closely. Credit funds won market share partly through speed of decision making, and a bank style committee structure can erode that advantage quickly.

Conclusion

For a decade, private credit competed with the banks on price and certainty of execution. It now competes on capability, which in practice means people. European funds are recruiting origination coverage, portfolio monitoring and workout expertise from leveraged finance and sponsor teams across London, Paris and the other major financial centres.

For anyone running one of those teams, the exposure is concentrated among vice presidents and directors who know the documentation, monitoring and amendment history of their deals in detail. They are rarely approached, because their names do not appear in league tables.

They are also hard to find through conventional channels. There is no public record of who has taken a loan from underwriting through to a consensual restructuring on the lending side, because that history sits in private credit agreements. Advertised roles and inbound applications mostly reach people who have already decided to move, and in private credit those candidates have usually met every competing platform. Reaching the rest means starting from the mandate, identifying the small number of people in Europe who have carried a loan from signing to workout as a lender, establishing where each of them sits today, and approaching them directly. Most will not be looking, and many will not have updated their CV since their last promotion.

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Sources

• Preqin, Private Markets in 2030, October 2025
• Bloomberg, Bloomberg Introduces Comprehensive Private Direct Lending Data For Deeper Private Credit Market Insights, April 2026
• Bloomberg Intelligence, Bloomberg Private Credit Annual Report EOY 2025 (as of Q1 2026), 2026
• Bloomberg Intelligence, Private Credit Outlook 2025, December 2024
• With Intelligence, Private Credit Outlook 2026, January 2026

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