Welcome to NLC’s 2025 Fund Finance market survey, providing unique insights into Fund Financing from a General Partner’s (GP’s) perspective across 2025. This year’s survey captures responses from over 75 GPs, a 25% year-on-year growth, across a broad range of private capital strategies and reflects how managers are adapting to a prolonged period of slower fundraising, evolving liquidity dynamics, and increased use of fund finance solutions.
Key Takeaways
- Term Loans Are the New Pricing Lever in Sub-Lines: Sub-line pricing tightened by a further 25–35bps in 2025 across major currencies. This reflects the pricing dynamics introduced by term loans and non-bank lenders, alongside increased competition among banks to deploy capital despite a smaller number of new fund vintages being raised. As a result, 57% of respondents now use non-bank lenders, up from 24% in 2024, and 76% are considering term loans in the next 12 months. However, as the results show, term loans and non-bank lenders are not just about pricing.
- When Fund Finance Scales Faster Than Operations: With more than half of GPs now citing fund finance operations as a key challenge and 91% indicating that a technology platform would be helpful to streamline operations, NLC has launched Infinitas to help GPs manage growing operational complexity through a dedicated, digital fund finance platform.
- From Bridging Tool to DPI Strategy: GPs are making more strategic use of fund finance tools to manage DPI across their fund portfolios. Sub-lines have emerged as the most widely used or considered solution, cited by 53% of respondents, while 42% use or are considering continuation vehicles and a similar proportion are using or evaluating NAV facilities.
- Fundraising Is Adjusting to a New Normal: Fundraising remained challenging in 2025, with average fund close timelines having extended to 25 months, up from 16 months in 2021. In response, some GPs are de-emphasising scale in successor funds and prioritising speed to close, with only 61% pursuing a larger fund in 2025, compared with 91% in 2024.
- Credit ABL Pricing Converges with Sub-lines: Following the launch of our Credit ABL strategy, the survey was expanded beyond Sub-lines. A historically meaningful pricing differential has largely closed, with median pricing now at 185bps in Europe and 195bps in the US – only marginally wider than Sub-line pricing for comparable funds.
Read the full paper: NLC’s 2025 GP Fund Finance Survey (GPs only)
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