CAIS Live Conversations, Building With Alts
Oct 10, 2025 · 58 min · 12 segments
In this episode of CAIS Live Conversations: Building With Alts—Brad Walker talks with Ken Kencel, Founder, President, and CEO of Churchill Asset Management, about the growth in private credit. They…
Ken KencelGuest
Brad WalkerHostAlex CavalieriHost
not to jump too far ahead, but the wealth channel is not in a too dissimilar position today.
In fact, I would say that having had a relatively modest start in call it 2006 to 2010 or so, there was a little bit of CLO activity, a handful of BDCs, but still very early days.
Starting in around right after the GFC, like 2010, 2011, institutions started looking at private credit, getting their consultants to take a hard look, recognizing the benefits.
And you had a period of, call it, roughly 10 to 15 years of what I would call the institutionalization of private credit.
And by the way, feeling out different managers, understanding different types of strategies.
The last 10, 15 years, which really was the proving ground for certainly the largest private credit managers today in U.S. and really in Europe and Asia now, has evolved such that I think the next 10 to 15 years – and you're a participant in making that happen – is really going to be all about the democratization of private credit.
And individual investors, whether it's initially through allocations by their advisors, and increasingly now as it's starting to evolve into their 401Ks and 403Bs, and really private credit having a defined spot in the individual portfolio.
What does that mean for your business now within Nuveen? Is there an edge? What's the value in
that for you? Well, I mean, if you roll back to when we joined TIA Nuveen in 2015, what we saw was, you know, in many respects, we saw this dynamic beginning to play out, right? So from our perspective, it was, gee, if we can benefit from Naveen's platform as a significant advisor and partner in the wealth space, and a distributor, if you will, in the wealth space, that we can significantly expand our footprint, right? So today, all of our wealth products, and we have two, actually three registered BDCs, Nuveen is our principal partner in doing that.
not to jump too far ahead, but the wealth channel is not in a too dissimilar position today.
In fact, I would say that having had a relatively modest start in call it 2006 to 2010 or so, there was a little bit of CLO activity, a handful of BDCs, but still very early days.
Starting in around right after the GFC, like 2010, 2011, institutions started looking at private credit, getting their consultants to take a hard look, recognizing the benefits.
And you had a period of, call it, roughly 10 to 15 years of what I would call the institutionalization of private credit.
And by the way, feeling out different managers, understanding different types of strategies.
The last 10, 15 years, which really was the proving ground for certainly the largest private credit managers today in U.S. and really in Europe and Asia now, has evolved such that I think the next 10 to 15 years – and you're a participant in making that happen – is really going to be all about the democratization of private credit.
And individual investors, whether it's initially through allocations by their advisors, and increasingly now as it's starting to evolve into their 401Ks and 403Bs, and really private credit having a defined spot in the individual portfolio.
What does that mean for your business now within Nuveen? Is there an edge? What's the value in
that for you? Well, I mean, if you roll back to when we joined TIA Nuveen in 2015, what we saw was, you know, in many respects, we saw this dynamic beginning to play out, right? So from our perspective, it was, gee, if we can benefit from Naveen's platform as a significant advisor and partner in the wealth space, and a distributor, if you will, in the wealth space, that we can significantly expand our footprint, right? So today, all of our wealth products, and we have two, actually three registered BDCs, Nuveen is our principal partner in doing that.
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