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Romaine Bostick: We’re going move on to our next guest and talk about the asset management industry. It's kind of an extraordinary backdrop going on right now. The consolidation, BlackRock buying HPS, Apollo building its insurance business, Franklin Templeton buying Putnam, private credit firms being acquired right and left.
But our next guest, well, she just talks a lot about here, about her firm actually isn't selling merging or rebranding. Dina DiLorenzo joins us right now, the president of Guggenheim Investments. Dina, thanks for being with us.
Thanks for bearing through some of our technical difficulties here. That’s okay. See how the sausage is made here. in real time here.
Let's talk about how things are going on behind the scenes at your firm here. Obviously a ton of growth here, but you've kind of taken a different approach here. You're not really going out there trying to grow inorganically, if you will, or are you?
Dina DiLorenzo: Well, it's always good to see you both. Thank you. It's been a long week at Milken, but it's been a really productive and exciting week, and, you know, when we started the week, I feel like we've come full circle, right?
We've seen volatility still in the fixed income markets, but the equity markets are absorbing and resilient, and keeping everybody really excited about what's to come. At Guggenheim, you know, we've been around for close to 22 years now.
I've been at the firm for about that time. And at Guggenheim Investments, we just continue to focus on delivering the strategies that we, where our core competencies are, and that's across the fixed-income spectrum, private credit. We've just recently, though, launched additional strategies under the private credit umbrella, asset back financing, and we're going to start offering some more vehicles and to get access to some of the more, I would say, important strategies under private credit, like structured credit.
Romaine Bostick: Well, I'm curious about the asset back financing side. I mean, you've talked about this before in the opportunities there. How does that change, say, maybe a couple of years ago?
Like, if we were having this conversation two years ago versus today, what's changed? I mean, what are clients actually asking?
Dina DiLorenzo: I don't think it's more about what's changed.
I think it's more about why it's important, right? And to put it simply... You know, there's three types of, you know, income is really important, right? So if you want to, and yield is really important when it comes to the income. So, we look at it, like, private credit, structure, credit, asset back financing.
Although they behave differently, right? They have that, they add a more resilient form of income stream.
And the asset-backed financing, and to put it simply as I was going to say, is it relies on cash versus the collateral of a company. So when investors, especially institutional investors, insurance companies, are looking at asset-backed financing, they're really focused on the cash flows, and based on the hard assets.
Katie Greifeld : Well, that's where I wanted to go, because, you know, we've heard a lot about asset-backed financing in the past couple days.
It seems like that's where a lot of folks are seeing opportunity here, and I want to talk a little bit about that demand, and, you know, why it seems to be picking up right here. Is it because, you know, it speaks to a broader, more defensive stance that folks are taking? I mean, can you extrapolate it that far?
Dina DiLorenzo: It could be. I mean, I think when you're looking at, you know, the, like, for example, we just launched land banking, right? That's one of the strategies under ABF.
There's a huge demand for home builders. Home builders are basically looking to, you know, leverage their balance sheets, and be able to, you know, leverage the existing demand out there, and there's a huge amount of demand for homes, right? So in order to build out and develop the land, you need to have a robust balance sheet.
So why not bank the land with an institution and then draw down on that when you can so you can reserve your capital to build out the properties, right? I mean, these are types of strategies that the private sector is really looking to get invested in, because, like I said, you can rely on those, on the cash flow that they give off.
Katie Greifeld : And I do also want to talk a little bit about the product landscape as well. I know that Guggenheim, you know, it sort of re-entered the ETF market. It's an industry that I've followed very closely, and we know that it's fiercely competitive there, and I would just love to hear how that experience is going so far.
You know, what you've learned at this point.
Dina DiLorenzo: So at Guggenheim, we're really focused on not saying you should buy a product, but more about these are the strategies that we offer, and these are the track records that we have in each of these strategies, and we can create bespoke solutions, or we create, you know, certain wrappers to help you get access to those. We believe that providing the active management ETF right now is really important because it provides you with the flexibility and the liquidity, as well as the transparency, and for just not only retail clients, but also institutional clients like insurance companies, some of the strategies that we're offering are really good for their capital requirements, right?
So, they like particularly covered call strategies and hand stuck equity strategies were offering that. We believe that, like I said, I think I, you know, talked to Bloomberg in the past about how important we think structured credit is as an asset class. We're going to be offering securitized credit and CLOs in the form of an ETF, which democratizes those strategies that in the past are often perceived as very complex and hard to access.
So if you're packaging them in wrappers that provide you with that liquidity and that valuation, there'll be a higher sense of comfort, you know, and, you know, accessibility.
Romaine Bostick: Well, I'm curious.
I mean, what should point out, I mean, you guys have kind of been, you know, we talk about this rubbing other shoulders between public and private markets. that's kind of been your bread and butter. You were doing that before anyone. You were doing private credit before anyone got a practice.
Dina DiLorenzo: Yeah, I think that's a real differentiate for us, right? I mean, you have the firms that really focus on private credit. And, you know, now you've seen the ones that were really focused on liquid credit, trying to get out there and buy, and merge, and bring those offerings in house. I mean, we've been specializing in both since we opened our doors, and the operating model around that is super important.
It's not just about generating the performance. It's really about providing the efficiency of the operational infrastructure, right?
And that is why you've probably seen some of the reactions with certain, you know, vehicles like BDCs. We are leaning into the BDC, like we're launching a non-traded BDC, because we believe that that private credit asset class is still an important asset class.
There's still a tremendous demand for it. And if you manage the product correctly, and you have a tremendous amount of experience operating it, you should, you should really have no issues.
Romaine Bostick: Well, can you draw a distinction, though, between your underwriting standards, and maybe some of the newer entrants into this space, because, I mean, you've seen all the hullabaloo over this. And, I mean, you brought up the insurance companies.
I mean, you're doing, like, $140 billion for insurers right now, which is a different type of capital, and a different type of risk profile here. Your underwriting standards—have they shifted at all?
Dina DiLorenzo: We've, our investment process is team based, and we've always had a very strict due diligence process. Like, I'll give you a statistic which I'm really proud of, right?
I mean, we've been, we keep track of all of the opportunities that are presented to us or that we source ourselves in a very technologically sophisticated system, right? And I would say depending on the surge of originated transactions that come our way, we look at anywhere between 800–1,500 opportunities a year, and maybe we allocate capital to 10 percent of those deals. It's all about, and this is really important, right?
Like, right now, our focus is adding duration, you know, like, correctly, being very selective on the long end, underwriting discipline is immensely important, right?
Making sure that you're structuring income correctly as well. So with our due diligence process, our underwriting savvy, the fact that we've been through several credit cycles, it's quality over quantity, is strictly important to us, and we share all of that transparency with our clients. Like, for example, right now, with the software issue that most of our competitors are facing, yes, we're exposed to software, but we've been managing that risk. We keep an AI scorecard, right?
We are definitely on top of where you're supposed to be investing, allocating capital, and being wary of, you know, some of the yellow flags are made surface.
Katie Greifeld: I do want to go back to what you were saying about, you know, the fact that you're also leaning into BDCs, because, definitely that has been sort of a vehicle that's been a little bit villainized, and the non-traded BDC that you're launching, who's the intended audience there, the audience that you're thinking of, because it seems like there's a big distinction between demand when it comes to institutional investors versus retail investors right now, and I just wonder what you're seeing there.
Dina DiLorenzo: Well, we're launching it for both, so the seed capital, believe it or not, is coming from institutional, right? And it's really for, the insurance products for those institutions. So there's still a huge demand for private credit, and the way we're approaching the BDC is it's going to be a commingled approach with structured credit, ABF, as well as private credit.
So again, although they behave differently, they're giving you that stabilized, resilient income stream that you're going to need and want in those types of vehicles.
Katie Greifeld: Interesting. And then I do also want to talk a little bit more about CLOs.
You mentioned, you launched a CLO ETF, and that really has been a hot spot over the past couple years as you have these elevated rates. But the idea that they're coming down, you've seen that, you know, sort of start to manifest itself in the form of outflows. And I wonder if that's a concern for you at Guggenheim or is that just the way the markets…?
Dina DiLorenzo: No, as a matter of fact, you know, CLOs has been our bread and butter for a really long time, so much so that we've actually enhanced the team. We've just onboarded a team from, that was previously at Blackstone.
They joined back in the fourth quarter of 2025. We're continuing to hire. We just actually announced one of our CLO that we just warehouse that we just launched into the institutional marketplace.
And we believe that right now, especially given the uncertainty, with the rates, right, the Fed policy, the geopolitical tensions, and really, it's not just about, I would say, rate fluctuation, but also inflation. It's real return risk, right? Like, what is the real return based on the yields that you want, and with the CLOs, you really get to access that floating rate structure, right?
And then you get those pooled of the pool tranches, you mitigate some of the risk, right? So, CLOs, you could buy a CLO and be an equity partner, or you could just be a straight owner of the CLO. So, educating our clients, providing now thought leadership, and now packaging those into our retail life structure,
I think it's going to be really interesting and differentiate us.