European credit investment firm AlbaCore Capital Group closed its second fund, AlbaCore Partners II ICAV, which has €1.5 billion ($1.63 billion) in total AUM.
The firm is planning to debut CLO in 2020, which is currently in the warehousing phase. AlbaCore’s total AUM now stands at €3.6 billion ($3.9 billion) across its commingled and customized vehicles.
The firm’s investor base includes pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, endowments, insurance companies, consultants and family office investors, across Europe, North America, Middle East and Asia.
AlbaCore’s strategy focuses on bespoke private credit solutions for larger European companies, with the flexibility to opportunistically invest in secondary and primary markets when relative value is attractive. AlbaCore expects Fund II to be approximately 60% deployed at the end of February, after actively buying in the Q4 2018 credit market sell-off, and more recently shifting focus to primary and private markets. AlbaCore was the sole underwriter for subordinated debt related to two UK public-to-private transactions: BCA and Ei Group. Fund II gross IRR for 2019 was +20.6%.3.
“Our investing over the past fifteen months demonstrates the value of a flexible mandate in periods of market stress and also periods of resurging positive sentiment, as we saw in the second half of 2019. We are particularly excited about the recent BCA and Stonegate’s acquisition of Ei Group deals, which exemplify AlbaCore’s ability to provide unique, sizeable capital solutions that helped unlock the deals for the sponsor, while also providing an attractive risk/return to our investors,” said Bill Ammons, founding partner and portfolio manager._x000D_
AlbaCore has built a 32-person team across its London and Dublin offices, and invests in a capital structure-agnostic manner, via a combination of senior secured loans, high yield bonds, private debt, and preferred equity. AlbaCore’s focus on generating consistent risk-adjusted returns across the capital structure and liquidity spectrum has generated 870bps of gross alpha over European credit markets across its two funds since inception.
AlbaCore’s maiden CLO will also incorporate AlbaCore’s unique investment process and focus on ESG as part of its credit selection criteria.
Deborah Cohen Malka, managing director and deputy portfolio manager, added, “ESG is a critical element of our Firm’s values and investment process. We continue to enhance the manner in which we implement ESG as part of our bottom up credit selection process. We also value our partners’ input to understand and incorporate their ESG ideas so we can continue to be a dynamic leader in credit investing and ESG related issues.”
AlbaCore is a specialist European credit platform focused on European corporate credit markets.
