This issue of ABFJ pairs hard market data with the people shaping what comes next. We dig into the forces blurring the line between private credit and asset-based finance—falling direct lending volumes, structured chip leases, and new regulatory scrutiny of bank-nonbank exposure—and ask what they mean for the second half of the year. Then we turn to our 2026 Top Women in Specialty Finance list: 48 honorees whose profiles, read together, trace a real generational shift in the industry, backed by an anonymous survey of the honorees themselves on what’s changed and what hasn’t.
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...
Read moreDetailsEach year, ABF Journal recognizes the women shaping specialty finance — dealmakers, credit officers, general counsel, founders and operators whose work spans asset-based lending, factoring, private credit and beyond. This year’s class of 48 honorees was nominated by their peers and selected for the impact they’ve had on their firms, their clients and the industry at large.
What follows is a two-part portrait. First, a feature article built from these honorees’ own words — drawn from a series of questions we posed about opportunity, barrier and change, alongside results from an anonymous industry survey fielded to the same group — that traces how the role of women in specialty finance has evolved and where it’s headed next. After that, individual profiles of each honoree, in their own words, covering the career paths, defining moments and hard-won lessons that brought them here. Together, they offer both the data and the detail: a snapshot of an industry in transition, told by the people driving it.
Ask a woman who has spent three decades in specialty finance what has changed, and she will often start with a room: a boardroom, a closing dinner, a trading floor or maybe a golf outing she wasn’t invited to. “When I started 31 years ago, I often was the only woman in the room,” says Teresa Harmon, co-office...
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