Steven Hunter & Huss El-Sheikh: Breaking Down the Silos in Credit Markets

For years, the credit markets ran on clean lines. A bank loan was one thing. A bond was another. Private credit sat off to the side.Those lines are gone. Global credit is becoming one integrated market, $145 trillion in scale, and almost none of its infrastructure was built for what it has become.Steven Hunter and Huss El-Sheikh met at university, shared a London flat and turned a shared frustration into 9fin. The incumbent solution to reading credit documents was 5,000 people retyping them by hand. They taught machines to do it instead. Today, it's a billion-dollar business and the closest thing debt markets have to a central filing system.In this episode of the Modern Capital Podcast, Steven, Huss and Marc cover:Why buyers stopped wanting point solutions (and what they want instead)The inverted newsroom: machines publish what companies say, journalists chase what no machine can reachWhere AI stops in credit and why confidently wrong is the cardinal sin of financePrivate credit's move from 0% of large private equity deals to a 50-50 split with the syndicated markets, and Steven's ten-year call on where it lands"The clear, distinct silos between the asset classes within private markets, and in particular debt markets, are completely breaking down. Market participants effectively play across all of them, and they're all very interchangeable."The walls came down faster than anything got built to replace them. The tooling underneath still assumes they're there.