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 a single integrated market, $145 trillion in scale, and almost none of its infrastructure was built for what it has become. The data, the workflows, the analytics: all of it was organized around categories that are dissolving.
I sat down with Steven Hunter and Huss El-Sheikh, the co-founders of 9fin. They’re building an information infrastructure for global credit markets.
They met at university in 2010 and later shared a flat in London. Steven was in debt markets at JP Morgan, Huss was building trading technology at Deutsche Bank.
Steven’s memory of arriving on the job? “I felt like I’d been teleported back 30 years.”
Pricing a loan meant Internet Explorer and a Java applet. Analyzing a company meant hunting an email chain for a 1,000-page PDF, then retyping the financials into Excel.
The incumbent answer to reading those documents was 5,000 people typing them out by hand. Slow, expensive, inaccurate, and to you needed twice as many people to cover twice as many companies.
So they quit on the same day and taught machines to read them instead, years before anyone called that AI.
Nearly a decade later, 9fin is a billion-dollar business and the closest thing debt markets have to a central filing system.
The convergence showed up fast:
In 2016, you couldn’t do a billion-dollar private credit deal. Today, it’s roughly a 50-50 split between private credit and the syndicated markets on private equity deals.
Steven’s ten-year call: it all ends up traded, bigger and looking like the leveraged loan market. People said leveraged loans would never trade either.
"You used to have large private equity firms with small private credit arms attached. Now you have private credit firms with small private equity arms attached."
They’ve been at this long enough to be unsentimental about AI. Steven is blunt: the models are confidently wrong, which is the cardinal sin of finance, and 97% is not good enough when people lose their jobs for the 3%.
A few more things we cover:
The inverted newsroom: machines publish what companies say, journalists chase what no machine can reach
Where AI stops in credit and the judgment calls no model can make
Collateralized robot obligations and how the next industrial base gets financed
"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."
Please enjoy this conversation.
What AI can do inside a credit workflow (and where the humans have to stay) is a central theme on the agenda at The 2026 Private Markets AI Summit on November 4 in New York.
GPs, LPs and technology leaders building intelligence into the operating layer of private markets. Problems like these are what that room is for.