North America CLO House: BNP Paribas
Sweet spot
BNP Paribas has picked up market share as a US CLO arranger amid skyrocketing issuance, moving into the top five after sitting outside the top 10 just four years earlier. Its effort to balance growth with client attention makes BNP Paribas IFR’s North America CLO House of the Year.
BNP Paribas said it has found a "sweet spot" in fourth position in the US CLO arranger league table. The European lender made a conscious decision to increase its market share – it did not even crack the top 10 in 2021 – over the past few years while providing personalised attention to its clients.
“We view that as the sweet spot where you have all the flow, all the colour, you are close with all the investors, all of the issuers, but you also have bandwidth to focus where it’s not just announcing five deals at the same time,” said Stefan Zotovic, BNPP’s head of US CLO syndicate. “With that intersection of bandwidth and flow and connectivity to the market, we’re kind of at the sweet spot and that is all by design; how it’s been set up from the beginning.”
It is a significant jump up the league tables for the bank, which in the first three quarters of 2025 arranged more than 20 new issue US CLOs for managers including Blackstone, Oak Hill Advisors and Onex Credit Partners.
“If you look at how our league table progression has changed over the last [few] years, we were consistently a seven, eight, nine player, and the last two years we’ve been a top four player consistently,” said Alexandra Middleton, who co-heads US CLO Primary at BNP Paribas with Alexander Wall.
“Part of that has been our connectivity with clients, expanding on that, being that stable force they can count on when maybe that hasn’t been the case elsewhere and then making sure we are providing value-added leadership on both the syndication and structuring side.”
The bank's jump in standing comes as the CLO market has seen a surge of issuance, with a record US$197.9bn of volume in 2024, up from just US$90.2bn in 2020 amid the pandemic, according to LPC Collateral data.
“I think a lot of the work we did in 2022 and 2023 by trying to price deals the right way, spending time in the trenches to find the right investors for some of our largest clients, paid off. And a lot of those clients wanted to do more volume with us and that created positive word of mouth for other managers that maybe we hadn’t connected with,” Middleton said.
The US CLO team works across broadly syndicated, middle-market, private credit and infrastructure CLOs, which clients appreciate, Middleton says.
The bank has also put a particular focus on helping managers new to the CLO market, especially firms that are issuing their first private credit CLO, a growing area of the asset class.
Private credit CLOs have been a “major focal point", Zotovic said.
It arranged Morgan Stanley Private Credit’s inaugural CLO as well as Apollo Global Management’s first business development company-managed middle-market CLO.
The bank was also able to lock in the tightest print for a five-year reinvestment/two-year non-call period US BSL CLO. BNP Paribas arranged OHA Credit Funding 20 for Oak Hill in late February, with the US$307.5m Triple A tranche pricing at 110bp over SOFR.
Pricing came just weeks before "liberation day", which led to Triple A spreads widening. And yet even as the margin on senior tranches has tightened, OHA Credit Funding 20 still holds the title of the tightest in 2025.
Its customised roadshows for managers to meet specific investors has been a major selling point.
“Clients remember that and it shows up in the execution. That is part of how we are able to set the market with some of our larger clients – by spending time that is needed to advise them the right away to do this type of deal at this time, to take advantage of the depth of a bid in Tokyo, if that’s where it is, or in the US,” Middleton said. “Because we’re at that intersection, we think that helps us time the market with the right client at the right time.”