BNP Paribas’ Laleh Bashirrad on leveraged finance trends and 2025 outlook

On the latest episode of the Debtwired! podcast, Laleh Bashirrad, managing director at BNP Paribas' leveraged syndicate team, speaks to Melina Chalkia, primary markets reporter of Debtwire North America, about the latest trends in the broadly syndicated market and the 2025 outlook.Bashirrad has over two decades of credit experience advising sponsors as well as large and midcap clients on capital structure and pricing considerations for buyouts, acquisitions, recapitalizations and refinancings. In this podcast, Bashirrad gives an overview of the current supply and demand dynamics in the BSL market and outlines her optimistic view on demand for high yield products. While she expects the trend of refinancings to continue to dominate in the early months of 2025, she notes the building M&A pipeline could bring forth robust activity for the rest of the year. Bashirrad also highlights partnership opportunities between BSL and private credit, which are often seen as competing market players.