Former Citi associate's new $2.7m private credit job
If you want to escape banking and make seven figures now, private equity may not be the place to do it. Private credit, however, is, and one former Citi associate is demonstrating how.
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Just 10 years ago, Jens Bauer was a fresh-faced associate in Citi's London leveraged finance team. Now, he's just got a job paying an estimated $2.7m running European performing credit at Oaktree, the alternative asset investment manager.
How do you go from a junior in Citi's leveraged finance team to one of the top jobs in private credit in London over a decade? Bauer isn't commenting, but may be a case of being in the right place at the right time.
When he joined Permira as an investment professional in 2015, the firm was in the process of expanding its modest lending arm: its first fund had been raised the year before, for €400m. And in 2021, it had total assets of €10bn, a number it wanted to double by 2025, according to Private Debt Investor. Bauer was promoted to MD as part of this ambition, and at age 36 (approximately) he was appointed to Permira's investment committee.
This set him up for his new job at Oaktree. It's not a bad place to end up - it paid around £213k ($288k) per head in London in the year ending March 2024 to its ordinary staff. Its “members” – UK corporate jargon for legal partners – earned an implied average of £383k ($519k) in salaries, and an implied average of £1.6m ($2.2m) in bonuses. £2.0m ($2.7m) isn’t bad for someone who was an associate just a decade ago.
These sorts of bold rises only happen during gold rushes. And direct lending is the crown jewel of private credit, itself the star-performant asset class of the last few years. According to data from market intelligence provider BCG Expand, private credit averaged a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 9% between 2020 and 2024. In that same period of time, direct lending specifically achieved a CAGR of 15%, by far the highest under the private credit umbrella.
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