Tom Duffy

This space is still dominated by family offices or mezzanine funds or high net worth individuals backing these deals.

So why do institutional investors avoid this space that we find so attractive at TIFF?

Simply put, it's a complex market to navigate.

It really requires a combination of both company and deal underwriting, as well as manager level underwriting.

And it's a substantial amount of time and effort to navigate.

One of the things that truly differentiates how we approach this market is that we have a double layer of diligence on every deal.

And we have a purpose-built team that does this.

We want people on our investment team who have both sponsor and manager diligence expertise, as well as individual deal diligence expertise.

What we like to say is that our diligence is very much sponsor first.

before we look at the deals.

We want to underwrite investors that we can build long-term partnerships with.

After we underwrite the sponsor and approve them for our platform, then we'll look at the underlying deals that they bring to us, which on average is a handful of each year.

And when we do approve them, we're not required like some of our competitors to invest blindly in every single deal because we do that double level of diligence.

We want to underwrite every single deal that comes through our independent sponsors.

And that's what we do.

And that's differentiated at TIFF.

Yeah, of course.

And a lot to unpack here.

Starting with sponsors, when we think back on our decade plus of active investments in this space, we see the independent sponsor market as more attractive today than when we began back in 2014.

The market is deeper and more professionalized.