The Data Tapes

Setpoint's Bite-Sized Debt Newsletter: November Edition I

November 13, 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 Named 2025 Fintech Game-Changer of the Year: We’re honored to be recognized by Opportunity Austin’s 2025 A-LIST Awards for our work modernizing how capital moves through asset-backed finance — bringing transparency, trust, and efficiency to lenders, investors, and borrowers. We’re just getting started, and we’re hiring. Check out open roles.

  • 📣 Hear from Stuart Wall at Citi’s 2025 SPRINT Summit — Nov. 20: Setpoint Co-Founder & CEO Stu Wall will join industry leaders on a panel — View from the Top — at Citi’s 2025 SPRINT Fintech & Private Credit Summit on Thursday, Nov. 20, at Citi’s headquarters. Don’t miss the discussion — register to attend.

  • 🤝 We’re on the road — let’s connect: We’ll be at a few more industry conferences before 2025 comes to a close, and we’d love to meet.

    • SFR West, Dec. 2-4 — Scottsdale, AZ | Meet with us.

    • Opal ABS & Fintech Specialty Finance Forum, Dec. 9-11 — Dana Point, CA | Meet with us.

💸 Debt Financings & Acquisitions

💰️Platform Growth

📈 Visuals

🗣️ Market Commentary

  • “We’re beginning to see huge rating agency arbitrage in the insurance business,” told his fellow financiers at Hong Kong Monetary Authority’s Global Financial Leaders’ Investment Summit on Tuesday. “In 2007, subprime was all about rating agency arbitrage. What you see now is a massive growth in small rating agencies ticking the box for compliance of investment. If we look at the insurance business, to me, there is a looming systemic risk coming through and it’s because of lack of effective regulation.” - UBS Chairman Colm Kelleher on Purported Insurance Ratings Agency Arbitrage 

  • “The truth is that there are always defaults and not infrequently defalcations (how’s that for a good old-fashioned word?). Over my 47 years in the high yield bond market, more than 2% of all bonds by value have defaulted in a typical year, and many more during crises. If you apply that percentage to the number of sub-investment grade issuers, which runs in the thousands, it shouldn’t come as a surprise if there are a few dozen defaults in a normal year.” - Howard Marks, Oaktree Chairman on Systematic vs Systemic Issues in Private Credit

  • “When a sector of the credit markets is small or nonexistent, and then becomes more frequent and becomes large, which it’s not yet. When it gets momentum, you’re supposed to be cautious. These transactions, particularly in investment grade, are novel in the way they’re structured, the features in terms of being off balance sheet. I think you’re supposed to be careful. It’s unknowable at the moment whether these capital projects will actually be profitable. We also don’t know how many will be built. They’re building capacity and when you build capacity in fixed assets, sometimes you build too much or not enough because these projects take years to put together. By the time they come online, there might be 100 more projects coming online that could be sufficient or insufficient. It’s really unknown. I think you have to have a level of skepticism.” - Robert Cohen, DoubleLine Director of Global Developed Credit on AI Debt Funding Cautions 

  • “This is fundamentally what people fail to understand. The rotation into private credit is a rotation out of equity. That is what investors are doing. That is what we observe. They are making a decision to take risk off because they perceive the ability to earn long run equity returns in first lien debt, top of the capital structure as an attractive opportunity. But I think we cannot as an industry deny that there was more value, just like there was more value in the equity market. We're now talking about where we sit in the valuation cycle and the alternatives that we provide. As I suggested, we believe that prices are high, that rates – long rates are not likely to plummet, and that we have enhanced geopolitical risk. And so, as a firm, we are in risk reduction mode. We preach risk reduction. Our balance sheet is in risk reduction mode.” - Mark Rowan, Apollo Chairman & CEO on responses to rotation risk away from credit as yields compress 

  • “You can come out with good recovery from a debt-for-equity swap, but if that’s showing up in strategies where it shouldn’t be, like a senior direct lending strategy, that’s concerning, and I’d worry about high frequencies of this.” - Tamsin Coleman, head of private credit for Europe at Mercer on Growing Risks of Equitizing Debt in Private Credit

📖 What We’re Reading & Listening To

Invester Presentations

Reading

  • ABS East 2025: Seeking Clarity in Complex Markets (AllianceBernstein)

  • ABS Re-Imagined: Rated Note (Feeder) Funds for Specialty Finance Companies (Edgar Matthews)

  • BlackRock Stung by Loans to Business Accused of ‘Breathtaking’ Fraud (WSJ)

  • Capital Allocation: Results, Analysis, and Assessment (MS Consilient Observer)

  • Cockroaches in the Coal Mine - New Memo from Howard Marks (Oaktree) 

  • How Long Does It Really Take to Build a Home? (Saluda Grade)

  • Private Credit Enters the Equity Business as Borrowers Struggle (Bloomberg)

  • Structure as the Secret Sauce: Evolving Beyond Traditional Fund Structures in Direct Lending (KKR)

  • Tricolor’s Frantic Final Days Began with a Call from JPMorgan (Bloomberg)

Podcasts & Interviews