Subscription credit lines— a tactic to inflate IRR
Over the past two years, however, the accuracy of IRR has been called into question thanks to the increasing ubiquity of subscription lines of credit. These loans, also known as commitment facilities, have long been used in the private capital industry to finance transactions before investor capital is called in, easing limited partners’ liquidity needs and making it possible for general partners to jump on deals more quickly. But lately, fund managers have been using subscription credit lines differently — and with greater frequency.
According to alternatives data provider Preqin, the use of commitment facilities among private equity funds has more than tripled in the past decade, with 47 percent of funds launched in 2010 and later having utilized the financing tool, compared with 13 percent of funds launched before 2010. And it’s not just that more private fund managers are taking out these loans. Preqin also reported that these once short-term instruments are now being used to delay capital calls longer — which investors, researchers, and other industry experts claim is leading to artificially inflated IRRs.
Two recent papers — one from a pair of Carnegie Mellon business school professors, one co-authored by two German researchers with a BlackRock private equity director — have explored the effects of subscription credit lines on IRRs and arrived at the conclusion that the loans have meaningfully improved IRRs without increasing the actual amount of money that investors take home.
The German researchers, Pierre Schillinger and Reiner Braun of the Technical University of Munich, worked with BlackRock Private Equity Partners director Jeroen Cornel to simulate how real buyout funds would perform if they had hypothetically used subscription credit lines. Simulating commitment facility use for less than six months resulted in only a 47-basis-point increase in IRR on average, or a 20bp improvement at the median. But increasing the time frame of the loan to a year led to an average IRR bump of 120 basis points — a median increase of 57bp.
“If used extensively, [subscription credit lines] can indeed lift fund returns substantially,” they concluded.