Private debt firms financed 77% of global buyouts in 2024, their highest share in the past 10 years, S&P Global Market Intelligence reported in February 2025 using Preqin data. For JP Conte and his family office Lupine Crest Capital, the displacement of bank financing by private credit is reshaping the cost of capital, the speed of execution, and the kind of seller a buyer is competing against.
How the Buyout Financing Stack Got Flipped
The shift didn’t happen overnight. Direct lenders moved into the space banks vacated during the regional-bank stress period that followed 2022, offering unitranche facilities, second-lien financing, and structures that banks couldn’t underwrite quickly enough to stay competitive. Private debt had become the default option for sponsor-backed deals by 2024, with bank-syndicated financing reserved for the largest transactions where bank balance sheets still made sense.
Banks have been pulled back into the market by the Federal Reserve’s rate-cutting cycle, with syndicated loan markets reopening and bank financing returning to competitive parity on the largest deals. The competition between bank and direct-lender financing now sits closer to even than at any point since 2023. The partial bank recovery is being read by sponsors as a sign that bidding terms could tighten over the next 12 months, with bank-financed deals offering covenant packages that direct lenders generally won’t match.
What’s interesting about that recovery is what it doesn’t change. Private credit assets under management continue to grow, and the underlying demand for non-bank financing among middle-market sponsors hasn’t softened. Direct lenders have proven they can underwrite, fund, and close transactions on tighter timelines than syndicated bank deals require, and that operational advantage will continue to pull deal flow toward the private credit channel regardless of where interest rates settle.
The speed advantage matters more than the headline interest rate. Sponsors will routinely pay 50 to 100 basis points more for a direct-lender financing that closes in 45 days than they’ll accept on a bank-syndicated deal that takes 90.
What This Means for JP Conte’s Family Office Model
Lupine Crest Capital operates differently from a sponsor running fund-stage deals. The family office invests across private equity, real estate, and venture, with also a focus on healthcare, financial services, software, and industrial technology. Several characteristics of that operating model are increasingly valuable.
The first is timeline flexibility. A family office that doesn’t face fund-stage redemption windows can underwrite at its own pace, take more concentrated positions, and hold beyond the timelines that fund-stage capital structures require.
The second is debt structure latitude. Sponsor-backed deals are routinely structured around aggressive debt-to-EBITDA targets, with direct lenders willing to underwrite higher multiples in exchange for tighter covenants and faster closing. A family office investing its own balance sheet doesn’t have to hit those debt targets to clear an internal hurdle rate. That flexibility lets the firm underwrite transactions with conservative capital structures that fund-stage sponsors would lose to a more aggressive bidder.
The third is the kind of seller the family office competes against. The Family Wealth Report’s November 2025 investment summit reported that 64% of family offices expect to make six or more direct investments in the coming year, citing BNY’s 2025 Investment Insights for Single Family Offices. That’s a real shift in the buyer mix. Some assets are being routed to family offices, like JP Conte’s Lupine Crest Capital, precisely because the patient capital case is easier to make than the sponsor reload case.
What 2026 Looks Like From the Family Office Seat
The PwC 2026 outlook expects megadeal activity to continue at its current pace and private credit to remain the dominant buyout financing channel, with a partial recovery of bank participation in the largest deals. Bain & Company’s 2026 private equity report, Outlook: Gaining Traction, describes the next 12 months as a period of selective recovery, with longer hold periods, tighter valuations, and more discipline around deal financing than the 2021 cycle showed.
A market where 77% of buyouts run on private credit is also a market where a patient, conservatively financed family office can hold for value creation rather than for fund-stage exit windows. The pricing pressure created by direct-lender competition compresses the equity returns available to fund-stage sponsors. That compression doesn’t apply the same way to a family office balance sheet, because the family office isn’t underwriting against a fund-level IRR target.
The execution advantage also matters. Sellers know which buyers can close.
A family office with no fund-stage clock, a small experienced team, and the capacity to underwrite without external committee approval is, in 2026 dealmaking, the buyer category most likely to actually close on the agreed terms. That reliability has become a value source of its own. JP Conte’s track record across multiple capital cycles, the patient capital nature of his family office, and the discipline of holding through dislocation rather than around it are what make Lupine Crest’s deal flow possible in a market where the financing rules have changed faster than the operating playbook. The 77% private credit number tells you which structure has won the buyout financing competition. The next number that matters is how many of those assets eventually rotate into the hands of patient buyers who can pay the going price and still earn a return on the way out.
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