Private credit has spent much of the past decade growing faster than the infrastructure around it. Loans are privately negotiated. Terms differ from deal to deal. Valuations are often periodic. Data sits across managers and systems, while many assets are still expected to be held until maturity. That model becomes harder to maintain as the market grows.
S&P Global estimates that private credit has expanded beyond $1.7 trillion in global assets. Its 2026 research argues that transparency, independent valuation and data standardisation are becoming increasingly important as the asset class moves further into the institutional mainstream.
A series of developments in 2026 suggests that the market infrastructure is beginning to catch up.
One of the clearest signals came from Apollo on 1 October. The firm announced that it had begun extending daily pricing across its $850 billion credit business, covering direct lending, asset backed finance, multi credit and opportunistic credit.
Apollo initially introduced daily pricing for its investment grade fixed income replacement strategies in July. Asset level pricing for applicable funds is expected to become available from 30 October 2026.
That is a significant change for an asset class historically associated with relatively infrequent valuations. There is an important distinction, however. Apollo states that its daily prices are estimated fair values based on internal methodologies and relevant market data. They are not necessarily prices at which an asset could actually be sold.
The importance lies less in creating a public market style quote and more in giving investors a more frequent view of what is happening inside their portfolios.
Pricing is only useful when market participants can reliably identify what they are pricing. Private credit still lacks much of the standardisation taken for granted in public bond markets. Deal documentation varies. Terminology differs. Information can remain locked inside manager systems or individual transaction documents.
In March, Apollo and Intercontinental Exchange launched ICE Private Credit Intelligence, designed to extract and standardise information from private credit documentation.
By October, Apollo said more than 5,000 ICE IDs had already been created. These identifiers are intended to support standardised reference data, analytics and independent pricing over time.
Other infrastructure providers are moving in the same direction. S&P Global has expanded its LXID identifier system into private credit, arguing that common identifiers become increasingly important as secondary trading grows and investors need more consistent valuation and risk analytics.
It sounds technical. In practice, it addresses a basic requirement of any large financial market: participants need a common way to describe the same asset.
Private credit has traditionally been associated with a simple model: originate a loan and hold it. That is changing too. McKinsey estimates that private credit secondary transaction volumes nearly doubled to $20 billion in 2025.
GP led transactions tripled to $12 billion, representing around 60% of total volume, while LP led activity reached approximately $8 billion. McKinsey sees this growth as part of the maturation of private credit, bringing additional liquidity and price discovery into an asset class historically built around holding loans to maturity.
Apollo has been building its own secondary trading infrastructure as well. Its dedicated desk, launched in 2024, has now facilitated more than $30 billion of trading volume with a growing group of counterparties.
The numbers remain small compared with public fixed income markets. The direction, however, is significant. A functioning secondary market gives investors another way to manage exposures, rebalance portfolios and generate liquidity before loans mature.
It also creates more observable transactions, which can improve price discovery.
A mature market needs more than buyers and sellers. Trades have to settle. Positions have to reconcile. Documentation needs to move between lenders, agents, custodians and investors.
S&P Global reports that private credit trade activity through its ClearPar settlement platform grew by more than 110% year on year in the second quarter of 2026. The company is investing in electronic settlement, reconciliation and more standardised workflows as private credit trading activity increases. BlackRock is approaching the same issue from the data side.
In May, it expanded private credit capabilities within Preqin, bringing together data, benchmarks and analytics across closed end funds, business development companies and semi liquid vehicles.
BlackRock describes private credit as fragmented across different structures and data sources, creating demand for a more connected view of liquidity, risk and performance.
Taken together, these developments are beginning to resemble the infrastructure surrounding established credit markets: identifiers, pricing, analytics, settlement and secondary trading.
Better infrastructure does not automatically make private credit less risky. It can make the risks easier to see.
BlackRock argues that private credit has already moved from a niche allocation into a core component of many diversified portfolios. As it has grown, differences in underwriting quality, vintage exposure, portfolio construction and sector concentration have become increasingly important.
S&P Global makes a similar point. The defining issue as the market scales is increasingly transparency rather than novelty.
Regulators are paying attention as well. In September, S&P Global highlighted new SEC guidance around fair value measurement and disclosure for private assets.
Private credit exposure inside registered fund portfolios increased from $170 billion at the end of 2020 to $270 billion at the end of 2025, according to SEC data cited in the analysis. As private assets reach a broader investor base, valuation processes inevitably face greater scrutiny.
That is another characteristic of a maturing market.
The development of this infrastructure does not mean private credit is becoming another public bond market.
Its appeal partly comes from characteristics that are inherently private: negotiated terms, customised financing structures, direct relationships with borrowers and the ability to structure capital around specific situations.
Daily valuations will not create continuous market prices where few transactions exist. Standardised identifiers will not make every loan comparable. Secondary trading will not give every asset instant liquidity.
The more likely outcome is a market that remains fundamentally private while acquiring some of the infrastructure investors already expect elsewhere. The objective is greater visibility and better market functioning without removing the flexibility that helped private credit grow in the first place.
For much of the last decade, the private credit story was primarily about growth.
More borrowers used it. More investors allocated to it. Managers raised larger funds and expanded beyond traditional direct lending. The next stage looks different.
The questions increasingly concern how efficiently the market functions.
- Can investors compare assets?
- Can they obtain timely valuations?
- Can positions be transferred efficiently?
- Can risks be measured consistently?
- Can portfolios generate liquidity when investors need it?
The institutions now being built around private credit are beginning to answer those questions.
For investors, that could make the asset class easier to analyse and easier to manage. It could also expose differences between managers, underwriting standards and portfolios much more clearly.
That is what happens when a market matures. Growth attracts capital. Infrastructure determines whether the market can support it.
☑️ Apollo, October 2026: Apollo Expands Daily Pricing to All Credit Assets, Advancing Transparency in Private Credit
☑️ Apollo, June 2026: Increasing Transparency and Tradability in Private Credit
☑️ McKinsey, June 2026: Private Credit in 2025: A Maturing Industry Navigates Change
☑️ S&P Global, September 2026: Creating Clarity in the Loan Market: Why Standardized Loan Identifiers Like LXIDs Are Essential
☑️ S&P Global, August 2026: Private Credit at Scale: Building the Operational Foundation for the Next Phase of Growth
☑️ BlackRock, August 2026: Navigating a Maturing Private Credit Market
☑️ BlackRock, May 2026: Aladdin Expands Private Credit Solutions on Preqin
