Welcome to Lender Lens, our series for profiling leaders in the Lender community.
With private credit playing an increasingly important role in the financial system, we wanted to find out how lenders are navigating the evolving landscape and how they assess the market in the coming years.
Dealmaking has become more complex in today’s market — and private credit is adapting.
We sit down with Miguel Toney, Partner at CVC, to discuss how CVC Capital Solutions is providing creative alternatives to support M&A, refinancing, and liquidity events. As an integral part of the CVC Credit platform, CVC Capital Solutions draws on the broader CVC network’s deep sector expertise and market insight to assess each opportunity with precision and flexibility.
Miguel also shares where they see opportunity in the current environment — and, on a lighter note, which sport they once dreamed of playing professionally.
How does CVC Credit’s Capital Solutions differ from CVC’s senior secured lending strategy?
The CVC Capital Solutions funds provide primary capital and even structured equity solutions to support M&A, refinancing and liquidity events. Our focus is on making junior capital investments to large cap businesses with EBITDA levels in excess of €100m. This contrasts with our direct lending strategies that provide senior secured debt facilities to mid-cap businesses with EBITDA levels of €25-75m. Notably, both strategies benefit extensively from the CVC network for sourcing, assessing and converting opportunities.
Current market dynamics, which have put a squeeze on the number of transactions being closed by PE sponsors, are fostering an increasingly complex M&A environment which falls into the sweet spot of Capital Solutions. In particular, the requirement for European PE sponsors to return to investors over time the $1.3 trn of value in their portfolio companies will necessitate capital solution transactions as a way of structuring exits.
The CVC network has played a key role in recent investments. What advantages does that give you in the Capital Solutions strategy?
The Capital Solutions strategy invests in established companies via tailor made structures after completing in depth due diligence. Having boots on the ground and local expertise in every major financial market worldwide is massively beneficial to Capital Solutions in sourcing the deals in the first place, but also in accumulating market and sector insight to properly assess each opportunity on its own merit. The global network of investors and partners also helps us when it comes to fundraising. Recent examples include Dream Games and American Heart of Poland.
Which sectors or geographies are presenting the most compelling opportunities for you at the moment?
Our sector and geographic focus is aligned with that of the broader CVC network. We have recently completed investments in the Mobile gaming sector alongside our Sports, Media and Entertainment team, and also in healthcare, consumer staples and software technology sectors with the support of the relevant CVC industry teams.
Geographically, we have private credit team members in most of the local country offices in Europe and North America working alongside our PE teams to source and complete capital solutions opportunities.
You have also recently completed a financing for Novus. How do you approach opportunities in sectors like consumer that can be overlooked?
We worked with the CVC Managing Partner specialising in US consumer goods to assess Novus’s market positioning, ambitions and growth prospects and concluded that their dips, salsa, yoghurt and desert brands, located in the perimeter of stores, were consumer staples benefitting from stable demand across economic cycles and food fads..
Notably, our thesis for supporting Novus also revolved around its local sourcing and sales efforts which insulated the business from the tariff impacts that impacted food businesses dependent on exporting sales or importing supplies into the US.
Lastly, we benefitted from the volatility in market sentiment caused by the Liberation day tariff announcements, as the banks that had initially underwritten the financing package for Novus were incentivised to work with us to reconfigure the debt package with the help of junior capital that we have provided at very attractive target returns.
If you weren’t in finance, what career might you have pursued?
I would have tried to be a professional cricketer. I was decent at a point in time but that was many years ago. I enjoyed the individual mental battle when batting or bowling, combined with the teamwork ethos, required to win.
