KBRA Deepens Its Funds and Private Credit Teams With Three Senior-Level Hires

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--KBRA is pleased to announce three new senior appointments to its already deep bench of more than 70 analysts dedicated to funds and private credit-related ratings and research. These additions will further strengthen a team that has been at the forefront of rating and assessing thousands of middle market-related credits in a variety of growing subsectors including fund finance, subscription facilities, NAV facilities, feeder notes, CFOs, business development companies (BDC), private credit funds, middle market CLOs, and many thousands of their underlying corporate obligors.

Scott Duggal joins KBRA’s Fund Ratings team as a Senior Director with more than 20 years of experience in credit, with a core focus on CLOs, RMBS, and ABS. Scott was most recently lead ABS portfolio manager and head of European consumer ABS, RMBS, and CLO research at Abrdn.

John Sage, Senior Director, will lead KBRA’s private credit research efforts in collaboration with our Corporates, Funds, Financial Institutions, and Structured Credit teams. John was previously at Bloomberg, where he was a lead journalist covering the private credit industry. Before that, he worked at Goldman Sachs in both the credit and investment banking functions.

Min Xu joins KBRA’s Funds team as a Managing Director, focusing on research efforts. Min previously worked at Natixis, where she was the credit risk officer responsible for approving CLO/ABS warehouse financing and capital call facilities.

“KBRA has been building teams dedicated to analytical thought leadership across the broad landscape of private credit for many years,” said William Cox, Global Head of Corporate, Financial, and Government Ratings at KBRA. “These teams, their experience, and the accumulation of a vast amount of data provide KBRA with relatively unique insight into the broad landscape of the private credit market and its trends. We are very excited to have Scott, John, and Min join our expanding platform. Our goal is to continue to bring independent thoughtful insight, analytical consistency, and transparency to this rapidly growing, complex, and otherwise largely opaque industry.”

KBRA has produced more than 3,500 credit assessments or credit ratings for middle market borrowers in private credit portfolios. In addition, KBRA has issued ratings for 250 market-leading fund finance transactions, more than 200 private asset-backed finance transactions, as well as over 150 feeder note transactions and 30 BDCs. We also maintain credit ratings on 50 of the world’s leading private asset managers and rate more than 100 middle market CLOs and dozens of other private credit, private equity, or NAV secondaries facilities.

About KBRA

KBRA is a full-service credit rating agency registered in the U.S., the EU, and the UK, and is designated to provide structured finance ratings in Canada. KBRA’s ratings can be used by investors for regulatory capital purposes in multiple jurisdictions.

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