Art Steinmetz and his team are partnering up with a private equity giant to push into an alternative investing space.

Today Steinmetz unveils a joint venture between OppenheimerFunds and the Carlyle Group. The JV will marry OpFunds' broad distribution force across different intermediary channels with Carlyle's private credit investing expertise.

Kamal Bhatia, head of investment solutions at OpFunds, and Mark Jenkins, head of global credit at Carlyle, will be co-heads of the new joint venture. The JV will go online in 2018 and will be equally owned by the two firms. Details like the size of the JV and the specific product structure(s) they'll use are still to be determined, Bhatia confirms.

"We haven't defined the product structure fully," Bhatia tells MFWire. "Over the next months we will work together on developing the right structure."

They're not creating a separate brand for the JV, at least for now.

"It is a joint brand at this stage. Our independent brands are very powerful," Bhatia says. "We didn't need to create a third brand at this stage."

This is the first such JV between Carlyle and OpFunds. Perhaps they will expand their partnership to other areas in the future.

"They have a very large private equity platform," Bhatia says of Carlyle. "At this stage we're completely focused on the private credit side."

The private credit space is expanding, Bhatia says, enough so that investors "can participate in it now." And "the marketplace has become ready for it," he adds, thanks to prolonged interest rates and an accelerating need for income.

OpFunds decided to team up with Carlyle, Bhatia says, because Carlyle has more than 30 years of experience in private credit, has global reach in the space, and has "cultural alignment" with OpFunds. 

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