Greg Myers Appointed Global Segment Head of Debt Capital Markets: An Exclusive Interview

Recently appointed Global Segment Head of Debt Capital Markets at Alter Domus, Greg Myers brings with him over two decades of experience in corporate lending and financial markets. Greg has been in the private debt space since 2003 and specializes in loan trade settlements, CLOs, structured finance, private funds and fund administration. Here in an exclusive interview, Greg reveals the blueprint for his new role and how he sees the private debt market performing post-Covid-19.

What goals are you setting yourself in your new position?

Over the last 12 years at Cortland and subsequently at Alter Domus, the vast majority of my work has been devising operational and fund administration solutions for private debt managers that are looking to outsource and right-size their operations for both middle and back office.

My goal now is to take those services that have helped our debt clients in North America for so many years and make them available to clients across Alter Domus’ global network including Europe and Asia-Pacific. This is crucial as so many of our global clients may not fall into the “private debt” boat but do indeed have credit needs.

For example, many of our real estate and private equity clients have a portion of their asset management business dedicated to credit. I want to make sure that everyone is thinking about possible credit solutions for all of our clients, especially since at Alter Domus we have the market specialists and operational staff and systems to support nearly any kind of credit issuing organization.

Dealing with data also remains crucial to our work, with an increasing need from our clients for data transparency consumption into their warehouse solutions. Going forward, we’ll continue to leverage and build upon our in-house tech talent and capabilities to provide them with specific data pool solutions and other bespoke service offerings.

We’ve seen a handful of clients enter the private debt space without having legacy systems, institutional experience or the staff requirements to support them, so we’re ensuring our outsourced solutions are available to them.

How have you seen the needs of clients evolve over the years?

The pandemic has given rise to a lot of questions. The vast majority of our clients are wondering what their borrowers are going to do or how they're going to perform. The government stimulus that has or is in the process of being issued is eventually going to run out. How is that going to impact their customers and where is that going to put them in a post-Covid world? Are they going to need to extend more credit? How is it going to impact the performance of their funds and their ability to make distributions to their clients or their investors? It’s still early stages to gauge the full impact of the pandemic, which will likely be felt through the end of 2021.

It has been interesting to see that our clients that lend to technology companies which operate online have done really well. On the other hand, the retail and the hospitality industries have been the hardest hit.

To look past the downturn, some of our clients are adopting new strategies. For example, a number of clients are buying large commercial mortgages or buying debt on hotels that are struggling, as the advantages of purchasing the debt and foreclosing outweighs the options of buying the hotel outright or building a new one.

Another thing that we're seeing on the DCM side is a lot of consolidation of assets, especially of business development corporations (BDCs). As BDCs mainly lend to small and medium enterprises—a segment vastly impacted by the pandemic—many haven’t performed well and are trading at hefty discounts creating opportunities for consolidation.

As many of these transactions are performed by private equity firms that are buying these debt assets, and since the systems that are in place for private equity do not work with credit, they’re often faced with either hiring a number of people quickly and installing expensive systems or simply outsourcing the service.

We are of course following these evolving needs of our clients very closely. Thanks to the depth of our experience, the specialized services we offer, the fact that we can operate on many different platforms depending on what the client needs from a banking or a custodial perspective, and that we have the right people, systems and customer-centric approach, we’re making these outsource decisions for our clients fairly easy to make.