LONDON and NEW YORK and DUBAI, UAE, Nov. 13, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — Pearl Diver Capital, a specialist global investment manager focused on structured credit and portfolio risk-transfer strategies, today announced the first closing for its new flagship vehicle, the Pearl Diver Aquanaut Fund, an open-ended global interval fund providing institutional investors with scalable access to global Significant/Synthetic Risk Transfer (SRT) and financial institution Capital Relief transactions. The first closing of cornerstone commitments occurred on 11/12/2025, the Fund will target total commitments of up to $1.5 billion.
Aquanaut is designed to capture the accelerating institutionalization of the SRT market, a segment that enables banks to optimize regulatory capital by transferring portions of credit-portfolio risks to long-term investors. The fund will focus on corporate loan portfolios originated by leading global banks across Europe, the UK, and select international markets.
“SRTs have evolved from niche bank capital tools into a mainstream credit asset class,” said Indranil (Neil) Basu, Founder and Managing Partner of Pearl Diver Capital. “With Aquanaut, we’re giving investors diversified access to corporate credit portfolios that deliver attractive risk adjusted returns, low volatility, and low correlation to public markets — precisely the attributes institutions seek in today’s environment.”
A Rapidly Expanding Market
Recent months have seen a wave of high-profile transactions that underscore the growth trajectory of SRT investing:
- Morgan Stanley completed an SRT with Blackstone transferring risk on its prime-brokerage margin-loan book, marking a shift of the asset class into riskier financing exposures.
- European banks such as Société Générale and Santander have executed over EUR 75 billion in capital-relief portfolios across corporate, SME, and specialized lending segments, according to internal market data.
- The IACPM Global SRT Insurance Survey reported that insurers protected €3 billion of SRT tranches in 2024, up from €1.2 billion in 2023, with total outstanding protections now exceeding €6 billion, demonstrating the market’s growing depth and diversity.
“These developments confirm the thesis behind Aquanaut,” Basu added. “As regulatory capital regimes tighten and banks seek to free up balance-sheet capacity, SRT partnerships are becoming central to global credit intermediation — and we aim to be one of the leading independent platforms in that space.”
Fund Highlights
- Structure: Global open-ended interval fund with periodic liquidity windows.
- Strategy: Invests in performing loan portfolios via first-loss or mezzanine tranches of synthetic risk-transfer structures.
- Target Size: USD 1.5 billion
- Pipeline: Diversified originations across European and UK banks, with expansion into North America and select emerging markets.
About Pearl Diver Capital
Pearl Diver Capital is a specialist alternative credit asset manager that focuses on investing in collateralized loan obligations (CLOs) and the SRT markets with a global investor base that includes public pension and retirement systems, corporate pension plans, university endowments and foundations, asset managers, large family offices and insurance companies. The extension into the SRT business is a logical expansion for Pearl Diver Capital, as the bank desks who handle these transactions are typically the same teams who trade CLOs. Pearl Diver Capital deploys the same rigorous data science and machine learning based processes to identify relative value within these securitized credit markets, while leveraging existing relationships.
Contacts
Investors: [email protected], UK: +44 (0)20 3967 8032, US: +1 617 872 0945
Media: [email protected], +1-203-682-8268
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SOURCE Pearl Diver Capital
