Winston & Strawn Sponsors, Speaks at SFVegas 2026

Winston & Strawn was proud to sponsor the Structured Finance Association’s flagship SFVegas 2026 conference at the ARIA Resort & Casino in Las Vegas. SFVegas is the world’s largest capital markets conference, drawing over 10,000 professionals from across the global structured finance industry to explore the trends, challenges, and opportunities shaping securitization, lending, and capital formation.

Nolan Bolduc, partner and co-chair of Winston’s Fund Finance & CLOs practice, moderated the “Fund Finance Deep Dive: Market Trends & Structural Innovation” panel. Drawing a standing room only crowd, this in-depth discussion provided attendees with useful insights into the current state of the fund finance space, including the fundamentals of fund finance, new structures and innovations occurring in the market, industry trends and market dynamics, risk considerations, and an outlook on the future of fund finance.

Key Takeaways

1. While the traditional co-mingled closed-end funds are still popular in the market, fund finance operators are now raising capital via a variety of structures, including separately managed accounts, no feeder funds, and interval funds, increasing their ability to handle complexity to meet alternative investors where they are as the market expands.
2. The market has seen the introduction of many new investors, in particular insurance companies (with hundreds of billions of dollars in collectively available capital), which has led to a growing number of rated feeders and insurance wraps. These products, by virtue of separation of tranches by risk profile and increasing innovations in the structures used, allow insurance companies to get exposure to private credit and alternative asset managers while managing their NAIC risk-based capital structure charges.
3. The NAV loan product is growing exponentially both in the US and Europe, primarily driven by a lack of DPI as the involved firms return less dollars to their LPs. These firms, which manage funds with longer lives, need incremental financing to continue growing the businesses in their portfolios over longer periods of time, and NAV loans provide an attractive alternative financing solution for this. Given that there is a massive backlog of unrealized portfolio companies within longer-term funds, this NAV loan trend is just starting and will continue accelerating for the foreseeable future.

Winston Structured Finance partners Pete Morgan, Mike Mullins, Francisco Flores, Russell Casper, Sean Kelly, Chris Capitanelli and Michael Lyon also attended the conference, along with senior counsel Dan Passage and of counsel Reuben Levavi.

Joining them were partner Jamie Saeli and associates Scott Englert and Emily Waltz of Winston’s Tax practice.