A little-noticed deal this week for senior-care clinics is the first shot fired in a Wall Street turf battle. BlackRock’s HPS credit arm is essentially lending $2.8 billion to Humana, marking Larry Fink’s entry into a space that Apollo has had to itself until now.
Apollo’s dryly named “capital solutions” business, launched in 2024, was a bet that asset managers could cosplay as banks. Their money could go places that banks’ deposit funding couldn’t, especially after post-2008 regulations. Apollo has since made big loans to companies including Intel and Keurig Dr Pepper, notching $800 million from the business last year on its way to a $1 billion target.
Two years ago, I wagered that BlackRock and Apollo would be the winners of the weird debt world that limped, then sprinted, out of the global financial crisis. Apollo got there first, but BlackRock just threw its hat in the ring.