The Global Investor 30 is based upon the market value of investors’ private debt investment portfolios. This value is measured at a single point in time for all investors to provide a like-for-like comparison. For this year’s ranking, it is 31 March 2019.

This is a ranking of investors only and not funds of funds or private debt funds.

What the ranking includes

• Private debt – The definition of private debt investment, for the purposes of this ranking, is capital committed to a dedicated programme of investing in the debt of private companies, or the non-bank debt financing of leveraged buyouts, infrastructure projects and real estate. This includes distressed debt, funds of private debt funds, royalty financing, senior debt, subordinated/mezzanine debt, unitranche and venture debt.

• Investor criteria – Investors with a defined allocation to private debt and active investors in private debt funds that may not have defined allocations are both considered for this ranking. Where the investments are made in what may be termed ‘grey areas’, we reserve the right to make the final judgment based on applicability according to our definition.

We understand that investors’ definitions of private debt may not entirely mirror the definition given above. Hence, we have used our discretion to determine the most appropriate figure for each investor profiled.

Structures and strategies

Capital committed or invested through the following strategies is included:

• Funds (both open-ended and closed-ended)

• Separately managed accounts

• Commitments to private debt fund managers that happen to be publicly traded

• Capital committed to co-investment vehicles

• Direct investments

• Proprietary capital (we do not consider assets managed on behalf of third parties)

What the ranking excludes

• Expected commitments – We do not count pending or future commitments and investments or the uncommitted portion of an institution’s target allocation.

• Hedge funds – We do not count hedge fund strategies as these primarily target liquid securities or trading strategies.

• Opportunistic investments – With these, there is no hard capital allocation to an investment programme.

Research process

PDI seeks to communicate directly by phone and email with investors to find out the market value of their private debt portfolios. In the absence of primary data, we have gathered data from secondary sources and sought to validate the researched figure with the investors before publishing the final list.