Jefferies Credit Partners seeks €1B from private credit investors for new secondaries fund

Jefferies Credit Partners is raising approximately €1 billion, or about $1.16 billion, for a new fund targeting the private credit secondary market. The vehicle represents a bet that demand for liquidity solutions in private credit is only going to intensify from here.

The fund will pursue a dual strategy: snapping up loans from Jefferies’ existing credit portfolios while simultaneously writing new loans.

Why secondaries, why now

Jefferies Credit Partners already manages roughly $25 billion across direct lending and collateralized loan obligation strategies. Adding a dedicated secondaries vehicle is less a pivot and more a natural extension of infrastructure the firm has been building for years.

Evergreen funds, the open-ended vehicles that allow periodic redemptions, have faced mounting withdrawal requests as investors rebalance or seek cash. When those redemption queues get long, someone needs to step in and buy the underlying loans.

Jefferies Credit Partners operates as the private credit arm within Jefferies Finance, a 50/50 joint venture between Jefferies and MassMutual.

Building on recent momentum

The firm closed its Direct Lending Fund II with over $2.1 billion in commitments in 2023. A filing for Fund III appeared in early 2025, signaling a pipeline of new vehicles even before this secondaries fund entered the picture.

For context, the broader private credit market has grown rapidly over the past several years, with major players like Apollo, Ares, and Blackstone all scaling their lending operations into the hundreds of billions. Jefferies, at $25 billion in AUM, isn’t competing with those behemoths on raw size.

What this means for the market

One thing working in Jefferies’ favor is its existing portfolio. Because the fund will partly acquire loans from Jefferies’ own books, it has a built-in source of deal flow that doesn’t depend on winning competitive auctions against other secondary buyers.

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