Barings names Sloan Sutta global head of its $60bn asset-based finance platform

Barings has put Sloan Sutta in charge of a $60bn asset-based finance platform inside the $502bn alternative manager, with a brief to expand what it can underwrite across commercial, consumer and residential collateral.

Sutta reports to Martin Horne, Barings' co-head of global investments, and joins from Crayhill Capital Management, where he was a partner and member of the investment committee. His earlier senior investment roles were at Och-Ziff Capital Management, now Sculptor, whose European CLO resets our pages covered in August, and at Garrison Investment Group and Credit Suisse.

He inherits a platform of 65 investment professionals working across public and private markets in commercial, consumer and residential strategies, which works out to roughly $920m of assets per investment professional at a firm Barings says has been in the market 40 years. Horne called ABF a strategic area of focus where the firm continues to see opportunities to build on the platform's scale, and Sutta described the job as expanding the platform's breadth and offerings across what he called the evolving ABF opportunity set.

A platform spanning three collateral types has to underwrite different servicers, different consumer and commercial credit cycles and different data sets, so the person setting its direction decides which risks the firm holds. Barings has changed who fills that role.

Fundraising around the appointment has not paused; Oaktree closed a $2bn asset-backed fund on 2 October, three days before the appointment was reported, and recent new-issue spreads from Neuberger's $508m CLO to Antares' $850m private credit vehicle with AAA at 145bp show liability buyers still engaged with asset-backed collateral.

Barings has been the subject of 35 stories this year, including a $150m deal close on 1 October, plus a $2.1bn extension of its North Carolina pension partnership and a Standard Chartered CLO mandate. What the announcement does not say is which capabilities Sutta adds first: new collateral types alongside the three the platform already runs, or deeper positions in the ones already there. Either way, $60bn and 65 investment professionals now report through one head.