Carlos Whitaker: Thanks, Jon. Our people are our most important resource. With over 500 professionals, we have the scale and bandwidth to form investment opinions on over 3,150 corporate issuers. We take those valuable insights and plow them back into BXSL’s investment process through portfolio monitoring and origination to derive BXSL’s investment performance. The performing credit investment committee has worked together for an average of 16 years and that continuity helps us refine our investment process. Since BXSL’s inception, our global private credit investment team has grown meaningfully, while we have only seen a few departures among senior investment team significantly involved in the North American direct lending strategy.
Blackstone credit has a team of senior investment professionals who engage with hundreds of the top financial sponsors we transact with. In addition, we have a dedicated team that covers strategic relationships with M&A and sell-side advisors globally, sharing pipeline and joint investment opportunities that often drive deal flow. We also leverage our sector expertise and insights across the credit platform with over 100 senior advisors, 950 technologists and over 50 data scientists across Blackstone providing us with valuable perspectives on how we invest, while also helping us monitor our portfolio. Blackstone’s deep platform can benefit BXSL in other ways. Blackstone growth, our private equity platform, real estate, life sciences, strategic partners, GP stakes business and tactical opportunities, all offer deep insights and support deal flow for BXSL widening our funnel.
That’s made possible from a platform with the size and scale of Blackstone. In an increasingly competitive private credit market, we differentiate ourselves by providing more than just capital to our portfolio of companies. BXSL borrowers are offered full access to Blackstone credit’s value creation program through cross-sell opportunities, cost savings, procurements and capabilities, including cybersecurity and data science, all at no additional cost, because we understand the end benefit to the investment portfolio. I echo Brad’s point earlier on the strength of our deal pipeline owed to our origination franchise that benefits from the scale and platform of Blackstone. Let me walk through a recent transaction we led in which combination of our platform advantages came into play.
Blackstone credit was the sole lender of the recently announced $3 billion merger of HealthComp and Virgin Pulse by New Mountain Capital, a top tier sponsor with deep expertise in the healthcare IT sector. We believe a number of factors differentiated us from other private credit lenders, our scale and our ability to deliver a one-stop solution for the entire capital structure. Blackstone credit committed to 100% of the financing, a large commitment across various levels of the capital structure. This is where scale really matters, especially when confidentiality is critical or in a situation where a sponsor can only call one or two partners. We have an excellent relationship with the sponsor, New Mountain Capital and lend to a number of existing portfolio of companies.
In addition, Blackstone has a broader relationship with New Mountain across the firm. While that doesn’t mean we lead every deal for them, our relationship is strong and presents us with opportunities to work closely with them. We talk about incumbency, leveraging our existing portfolio and this is a great example across our private and liquid credit platform. Prior to this deal, we were the existing lead private lender to HealthComp and we were also an existing lender to Virgin Pulse on our liquid credit side and their broadly syndicated loan. We knew both companies well and like their credit merits individually, which added to our conviction in the merger. Finally, the Blackstone credit value creation program has multiple levers to pull to assist the combined company, particularly on potential cross-sell opportunities across the broader Blackstone portfolio.
This has been demonstrated during the last 3 years when Blackstone credit was the private lender to HealthComp. We believe our value-added capabilities truly differentiate us as we are no longer just a lender to HealthComp, but also a value-added partner who aims to help grow equity value. As another example in BXSL’s portfolio, our Blackstone credit value creation team worked with a healthcare services company to prepare for a $15 million firm-wide procurement project and we already know the first stage of this project yielded approximately 20% in savings for the company. We believe our engagement on this project has not only improved the financial results, but also helped professionalize the procurement function of the borrower and view this as another instance of being a value-added partner.
