THERE’S A VERSION OF THIS ISSUE THAT LEADS WITH THE NUMBERS, AND HONESTLY, THE NUMBERS ALONE WOULD CARRY IT. Direct lending volume just fell to a two-year low, even after PitchBook revised the figure upward from its initial read. A $36 billion chip lease is being sliced into investment-grade tranches and sold like structured paper, blurring a line between private credit and asset-based finance that used to be much brighter. And for the first time ever, the Fed’s Senior Loan Officer Survey asked banks directly about their exposure to nonbank lenders — which tells you regulators are finally paying attention to something our readers have understood for years: banks and nonbanks aren’t separate systems anymore; they’re one system with two front doors.
Read together, these four stories are really one story. Capital is abundant, competition for deployment is fierce and the lines between products — cash-flow lending, ABL, structured credit and equipment finance — are dissolving faster than our vocabulary for describing them. If you want to understand where specialty finance is headed in the second half of this year, start there.
Where the market is going is only part of this issue’s story; we also explore who will lead specialty finance forward.
This year’s Top Women in Specialty Finance issue features 48 honorees and reading their profiles back-to-back is its own kind of market intelligence. Some entered the industry in the early 1970s, when a hiring manager could tell a mother of three she “wouldn’t last long,” and she proved them wrong by staying for decades. Others joined more recently, building healthcare finance platforms and origination teams from scratch. Between them sits a genuine generational shift, which we measure.
Alongside the profiles, we surveyed this year’s honorees anonymously and asked what’s changed, what hasn’t and what would move the needle fastest. The answer that came back most consistently was sponsorship. Women in this industry are mentored at rates that would make any HR department proud. They are sponsored — actively put forward for the deal, the promotion or the seat at the table — far less often. That gap, more than any other single factor, is what the data and the honorees themselves point to as the real work still ahead.
I spent a lot of time on this issue fact-checking market statistics down to the decimal point, because our readers deserve nothing less. I’d ask you to give the honorees’ words that same level of attention. Their answers are the most reliable data in this issue about where our industry is headed because they’re the ones taking it there.
Thank you for reading, and stay tuned for our final issue of 2026, which will cover notable deal activity and highlight the Best Companies in Specialty Finance.
