Octopus Investments is expanding into private debt and has hired a new team to lead the offering.
The private debt business will expand on Octopus’ existing capability and track record established in the real estate debt market. It will primarily focus on asset-backed lending in infrastructure and real estate.
Alan Cauberghs has been appointed as head of private debt. He has had a 30-year career in finance, with roles at Fischer Francis Trees and Watts, Schroders and Generali Investments. He spent the last 18 months at Investcorp, where he was mandated to diversify its private credit business by building out a bilateral lending platform.
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Octopus has also hired Allan Vlah, Freddy Murray and Martin Zdravkov for its new private debt team.
Vlah has had a 25-year career in the investment management industry with roles at River & Mercantile, Aviva Investors and Macquarie, primarily looking at equity and debt infrastructure strategies with a focus on energy transition investments.
Murray joins Octopus from MRY Renewables, a renewable energy solutions company he founded. Prior to that, he had a 15-year career managing and advising on infrastructure assets.
Zdravkov has spent his career as a fund manager at Aviva Investors, LaSalle Investment Management, and most recently, at DWS Group, where he was lead portfolio manager focusing on European real estate.
“We believe we are launching our private debt offering at an opportune time,” said Lieven Debruyne, chief executive of Octopus Capital.
“When looking at the financing mix of real estate, infrastructure and private equity projects, the largest part of the capital stack is debt. In addition, as the demographic shift towards retirement is accelerating, investment strategies are moving away from capital growth towards generating income in order to meet institutional client need. This results in a very sizeable market opportunity that we are excited to start exploring as we continue growing our institutional business.”
Cauberghs said: “Providing reliable income streams is a key expectation of investors. At Octopus we are looking to meet that client demand through purpose driven, asset-backed and cashflow-based debt strategies. We look forward to working more collaboratively than ever with our clients to close an important funding gap in the market, and I’m so pleased to have Allan, Freddy and Martin all on board alongside me to make that happen.”
Octopus’ new private debt offering will be aimed at institutional investors. The group previously tapped the private debt market at a retail investor level with its property-backed peer-to-peer lending platform, Octopus Choice.
Octopus Choice permanently closed in February 2021, almost a year after announcing it was suspending all transactions due to the impact of the pandemic.
It said that since the start of the Covid-19 crisis it had been unable to balance requests for withdrawals with demand for new investments. It added that “the P2P market more widely has seen reduced demand from retail investors following the introduction of new rules by the Financial Conduct Authority in 2019.”
