StepStone Group promotes three in private debt team

StepStone Group has promoted 19 new managing directors and nine new partners, including three managing directors who will be playing a private debt role: two in the Zurich office and one in London, Private Debt Investor has learned.

The new London managing director is Sophie Aslan. In Zurich, Marc Lickes and Jovan Samardzic were named managing directors.

According to her LinkedIn page, Aslan began her career at RBC Capital Markets as a summer analyst in 2012. She returned there the following winter (January 2013) and stayed until October 2014.

Aslan moved from RBC to Fidelity, where for four years she researched debt capital markets and European rates strategy. She has been at the StepStone Group since she left Fidelity in 2018.

Marc Lickes has worked at LGT Capital Partners. According to StepStone Group’s website, he worked there on “strategic asset allocation of multi-asset-class portfolios”. Before that, he was a research assistant at the Centre for Economic Research, Switzerland. He has been with StepStone since June 2017.

Jovan Samardzic is a quantitative analyst on StepStone’s corporate private debt research team.

StepStone’s promotions also include a new partner class. Of the ten new partners, four are on the real assets and two on the real estate team.

StepStone is an asset management organization founded in 2006. It closed its first credit opportunities fund in May 2022, having opened it in December 2020, working against the covid-stricken investment climate. The fund closed with more than $600 million, surpassing the $500 million target.