JPMorgan's Jake Pollack said it in August 2024: "the lines between competitor and client have blurred...some of our best clients in one area are also competitors in others, and that's okay." At the time, Wells Fargo/Centerbridge, SocGen/Brookfield had already built billion-dollar lending partnerships with private credit managers. Within months, the list grew to include Citi/Apollo ($25B), Mizuho buying equity in Golub, and JPMorgan committing $50 billion from its own balance sheet to originate deals, with FS Investments, Cliffwater, and Shenkman to co-invest. The PitchBook LCD team counted 17 joint ventures in 2024, up from three in 2023, calling this "co-opetition." Banks didn't retreat from private credit, they just stopped holding the loans.

What banks do now

Origination. The bank sources and structures the loan, the private credit fund deploys the capital and holds the asset (banks earn origination fees and manage the relationship). Citi/Apollo ($25B) and JPMorgan ($50B + $15B from co-lenders) are the largest, and Wells/Centerbridge ($5B+) was the first at scale. The model has spread to SocGen/Brookfield (€10B), Lloyds/Oaktree (£1B), Apollo/Standard Chartered ($3B), and others. Mizuho went further, buying a <5% stake in Golub Capital, a first for a bank taking equity in a US private credit lender.

Leverage. Banks fund private credit funds through subscription lines (borrowing against unfunded LP commitments), NAV facilities (borrowing against the value of the loan portfolio), and credit lines against existing loans (borrowing against outstanding loans). Bank lending to non-bank financial institutions (including private credit funds) exceeded $1.2 trillion by late 2023 and has grown significantly since.

Capital relief. Banks pay private credit funds to absorb defaults on loans the bank holds. If borrowers stop paying, the fund absorbs the loss. Ex. JPMorgan holds a $500M loan portfolio and pays Blackstone a fee to cover the first $50M of losses. A borrower defaults for $30M and Blackstone pays it while JPMorgan keeps the loans and the interest. These are called "significant risk transfers". Players on the bank side: Santander, Deutsche Bank, BNP Paribas, Barclays, Societe Generale. Firms on the buyer side: Blackstone, Ares, Apollo, Oaktree. The market hit €21.4 billion of new issuance in 2024, up fivefold since 2016.

Secondary market. Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, Jefferies, and Citi make markets in private credit loans (quoting prices and matching buyers / sellers). Apollo's S3 platform has facilitated nearly $10 billion of secondary trading volume, roughly half of the $20 billion total private credit secondaries market in 2025. On the infrastructure side, ICE launched Private Credit Intelligence in March 2026 with Apollo as anchor partner to build the pricing and data layer underneath (this didn't exist two years ago).

What's next

In March 2026, the Fed reversed Basel III Endgame and cut bank capital requirements across the board (banks need to hold significantly less cash against every loan they make). The regulatory pressure behind many of these partnerships is gone, but the partnerships are staying in place. As Apollo CEO Marc Rowan put it: "The bank typically does not want the asset...if they can grow without capital, that's return on equity enhancing." The new model works for both sides: banks keep the client and the fees, private credit funds get deal flow they couldn't build on their own.

Below is a market map of every relationship we've identified.