Pemberton hires Investcorp's Courtman to run its €1.6bn CLO platform

Pemberton Asset Management has hired Investcorp's Dominic Courtman to head its €1.6bn (£1.4bn) CLO platform as managing director and head of the CLO group, a role he takes up in January 2027, according to Alternative Credit Investor. Courtman, currently a managing director, deputy chief investment officer and senior portfolio manager at Investcorp, joins a European manager the report puts at $34bn (£25.7bn).

The hire arrives with a handoff: Rob Reynolds, Pemberton's head of CLOs, steps back from the role to pursue other opportunities, and Ben Gulliver, head of portfolio management and co-head of direct lending, thanked him for five years of contribution and credited him with establishing and developing the Indigo platform. Gulliver said Courtman's more than 30 years in the industry would be instrumental in progressing the platform's expansion. Who runs the CLO group between now and January is not in the coverage.

The record behind the mandate is recent: last year the platform issued two new CLOs, Indigo III and Indigo IV, repriced Indigo I, and the firm has said further issues are planned under the series. Against a $34bn firm, the €1.6bn CLO book is a modest slice of the business, and the title attached to it is one of growth. A deputy chief investment officer is a senior hire to put in charge of a platform that size, which suggests Pemberton expects the mandate to expand.

That expansion runs on a different engine from the rest of Pemberton: this publication's September coverage described the firm's European lending case as resting on M&A volume recovering, and the continent's direct lending record as leaning on American demand while European deal flow shrinks. A CLO group's output depends instead on the liability market for CLO paper and on loan supply into the vehicles, not on how many sponsored deals close. The January start gives Courtman a fresh issue calendar to aim at, and the pipeline behind Indigo is the firm's own word.

Pemberton's CLO push also sits inside the broader shift of the scalable end of private credit toward asset pools with a securitization exit. The coverage does not say what the Indigo vehicles hold, so how directly the CLO group touches Pemberton's direct lending book is unconfirmed. Pemberton has now staffed that group with someone who carried a deputy chief investment officer title at a competitor, a commitment larger than the €1.6bn book alone would justify. The next Indigo issue will say more about the platform's direction than the org chart does.