Hanna Sundqvist: Making Private Credit Risk More Transparent

Please introduce yourself, your organisation and your role.

I'm Hanna, Head of Private Credit for Europe at Moody's Analytics. Day to day, I work with asset managers, insurers, lenders and regulators across Europe to help them apply credit risk analytics rigorously across private markets, a market that's grown quickly and continues to evolve in its data and reporting infrastructure.

I sit on our Asset Management Segment Board and spend much of my time on strategic engagement with European private credit stakeholders, alongside publishing research on credit risk and portfolio resilience in this space.

What does your organisation do, and how does it support family offices, wealth owners, institutional investors or the wider private capital community?

Moody's Analytics builds the models, data and analytics that investors use to assess and monitor credit risk in private markets. Concretely, that means quantitative credit risk models, benchmarking tools that allow like-for-like comparison across managers and strategies, and portfolio monitoring technology that tracks credit performance at scale rather than deal by deal.

For family offices and wealth owners, the value is independent verification. Many are accessing private credit through funds or co-investments where they have no origination capability of their own, so they're reliant on what managers choose to report.

Our tools give them a way to stress-test credit quality and benchmark portfolio quality against the wider market alongside information provided by managers.

What are the biggest opportunities and challenges currently shaping your sector?

The opportunity is scale and institutionalisation. Industry estimates indicate that private credit has moved from a few hundred billion dollars a decade ago to a market now measured in the trillions, and that growth is drawing in a much broader investor base.

Family offices have moved from largely absent to steadily increasing private credit exposure, with intent to keep growing it. That creates real demand for the infrastructure this market has historically lacked: consistent data standards and analytics that allow like-for-like comparison across managers and strategies.

The challenge is that transparency hasn't kept pace with growth. Parts of the market rely heavily on manager-reported valuations and limited disclosure, which makes it harder for allocators to assess correlation, concentration and true risk across a private credit portfolio, particularly as more capital flows into asset-based and specialty finance strategies that behave differently to traditional direct lending.

Closing that transparency gap is one of the sector's defining challenges.

What trends do you believe will have the greatest impact on private wealth and private capital over the next five to ten years?

I'd point to a genuine shift in the centre of gravity of the asset class, not just its size. We are seeing increasing investor interest beyond traditional sponsor-backed buyout financing toward larger borrowers, hard-asset financing and investment-grade-adjacent counterparties; utilities, contracted infrastructure, AI compute and data centre buildouts.

We're now seeing private credit write multibillion-dollar cheques into individual transactions, at a scale that simply didn't exist five years ago.

That shift brings structural complexity with it. Joint ventures, platform-level stakes and asset-level financing are becoming mainstream tools for companies to fund capital-intensive growth, but they can introduce additional layers of complexity that may make risk assessment more challenging; increasing asset encumbrance and creating contingent liabilities that aren't always visible in a balance sheet.

Distinguishing genuine risk transfer from risk that's simply been made harder to see could become a central analytical challenge.

Alongside this, insurers are becoming a much larger source of capital into private credit, often via rated note feeder structures; which is increasing capital efficiency but also introducing more layered, structured-finance-like complexity into what used to be simpler lending relationships.

Across major jurisdictions, regulators and supervisors have increasingly focused on understanding where private credit risk resides within the broader financial system.

What expertise or perspective are you looking forward to bringing to discussions at the UK Family Office Summit Oxford?

My lens is quantitative rather than origination-led. My focus is on how data and models can identify credit risk and generate early warning signals to allow for proactive risk management.

A lot of my work looks at gaps between headline signals and underlying reality, for example where a valuation mark looks like fresh credit stress but is really just inherited pricing from when a loan was originated, where a completed asset looks operationally ready but isn't yet generating the cash flow a financing structure assumes, or where market-implied risk measures move well ahead of any real change in a borrower's fundamentals.

I'm looking forward to bringing that data-driven view of risk to the conversations.

What advice would you offer family offices, wealth owners or investors navigating today's rapidly changing environment?

Look past the label. “Private credit” is no longer one thing; direct lending, asset-based finance, NAV lending, hybrid capital and infrastructure-linked structures all carry genuinely different risk drivers, and increasingly different degrees of structural complexity.

Enhancing analytical capabilities may help allocators better see through structure to the risk underneath.