The Data Tapes

Setpoint's Bite-Sized Debt Newsletter: October Edition III

October 29, 2025

The Latest in ABS and Debt Markets

Welcome to The Data Tapes—your biweekly snapshot of private credit and ABS markets. In each edition, we bring you concise updates on debt financings, platform fundraises, data insights, market trends, and the latest from Setpoint.

🚀 What’s New at Setpoint

  • 📣 Setpoint Launches Industry Standard to Stop Double Pledging: PledgeCheck is a real-time certification that verifies every asset in a collateral pool is unique, accurate, and complete. It’s the first shared standard for collateral integrity in asset-backed finance, giving borrowers and capital providers the trust and transparency the market has been missing. Read the full announcement.

  • 🥇 Setpoint named #1 Startup in Austin: We’re proud to be ranked #1 on LinkedIn’s 2025 Top Startups List in Austin! From rethinking how private credit moves to building the infrastructure powering asset-backed finance, we’re just getting started — and we’re hiring. Check out open roles.

  • 🌆 Capital Conversations: On the Water — Nov. 6: Join Setpoint and Comvest Credit Partners for drinks and bites along Miami’s riverside as the sun sets. This open-air gathering will bring together investors, capital providers and borrowers from across the ABF ecosystem — you don’t want to miss it. Apply to attend.

💸 Debt Financings & Acquisitions

💰️Platform Growth

📈 Visuals

🗣️ Market Commentary

  • “The entire corporate direct lending market is a $3 trillion [addressable] market. I would categorize it as commoditized. These days you’ve got 75-100 general partners that have scaled corporate direct lending businesses, and it’s more than 50% penetrated by private capital. If you look at asset-based credit, it’s a substantially larger market…[estimating the total size at $30 trillion] We estimate it’s only about 7% penetrated by alternative capital.” - Evan Carruthers, CEO and CIO of Castlelake on the relative Opportunity in Asset-Based Finance vs. Direct Lending

  • “When we look at that, it says there are a lot of assumptions that are going to digital infrastructure, and you have this circularity of investments that link to each other…I would argue that’s also what’s happening in private equity with continuation funds and NAV lending. That seems like circular capital. As you start deploying into these areas of ABF which really touch the real economy, where there’s real demand for goods and services, these are areas that are not only easier to underwrite but that are void of the circularity you see in other areas of the market.” - Akhil Bansal, Head of Asset-Backed Finance at Carlyle on Circularity of Dollars in AI and Secondaries 

  • “Private credit can disappoint, maybe there are managers that will disappoint given the proliferation of the asset class…We think the key is having a big platform, and being able to move from asset class to asset class, where we don’t have to do direct lending if the risk-reward isn’t right.” - Josh Easterly, Co-CIO of Sixth Street on Drivers of Returns Compression in Private Credit

  • “The cost of funds has always been a big knock against us. How can we compete on cost of capital with companies that have a $4.5 trillion balance sheet? It seems impossible. But we sit atop one of the four biggest capital markets in the world, in that we originate prime US credit card receivables. And the securitization market, on the other side of that, is also pretty amazing. Traditionally, what would happen is you would burn a lot of VC dollars funding the delta between where you are and where the market is, and you would have to prove yourself over five or six years, and then you could access the securitization markets. But the recent and tremendous growth of private credit has changed that. There’s now a lot of capital chasing the assets that we originate, and that has allowed our cost of capital to fall amazingly quickly. Our cost of capital today is probably 75 basis points over that of a bank. Most of our ability to maintain this cost of capital is driven by the fact that there’s such a broad and deep bid for these credit card loans we are originating. And that’s been great for us, because it let us bridge that two- or three-year period when we didn’t have the track record to go to securitization markets.” - Daragh Murphy, CEO of Imprint on How Imprint Competes with a Smaller Balance Sheet than traditional Bank Card Issuers

📖 What We’re Reading & Listening To

Invester Presentations

  • Earnings & Investor Presentations

Reading

  • A Few Things We Learned - Q3 2025 (Octahedron Capital)

  • A Look Under the Hood - Howard Marks Memo (Oaktree)

  • Bankrupt PrimaLend Blames Subprime “Cycle” as it Seeks Bank Help (Bloomberg)

  • Lenders talk “Private Credit 2.0” in Miami as Market Grows into ABF (Pitchbook)

  • Surviving the AI Capex Boom (Sparkline Capital)

  • Talking with Daragh Murphy, founder and CEO of Imprint (McKinsey)

  • The Future of Fintech Report 2025 (SVB)

Podcasts & Interviews

  • ABF Increases the Lending Toolkit - Apollo Co-Head of Asset-backed Finance Bret Leas (Credit Exchange)

  • Ares’s Joel Holsinger Says Private Lenders Are Better Placed Than Public to Avoid Pain (Credit Exchange)

  • Blue Owl’s Matt A’Hearn - a generational opportunity in financing digital infrastructure (AGM)

  • Culture is Everything: Sixth Street’s Alan Waxman on Flexibility & Alpha (Exchanges at GS)

  • Dan Sundheim of D1 Capital on the art of public market investing (Cheeky Pint)

  • Expect more corporations to default - JPMorgan head of global credit financing Jake Pollack (Credit Exchange)