For this issue of Manager of the Month we profile the Secondaries strategy of Greenwich-based credit specialist Cross Ocean.
GP Overview –
Status: Established | Geography: Global | Market Cap: Mid Cap | Sectors: Secondaries
Cross Ocean Partners (“Cross Ocean”) is a global credit-focused alternative asset management firm founded in July 2015 as a partnership between its management team and Stone Point Capital (a minority investor). The firm was seeded via the spin-out of the European special situations business from Capula, bringing across approximately $1.6 billion of committed capital on day one. Cross Ocean has since built out four strategies: special situations, senior credit, CLOs and secondaries, operating from four offices in Greenwich, London, Dublin and Luxembourg.
This month’s piece focuses specifically on Cross Ocean’s secondaries strategy, a fund that acquires secondary interests in late-life fund vehicles across special situations credit, private credit and direct lending, natural resources, infrastructure, real estate, and other asset-backed private equity portfolios.
Strategy
Cross Ocean’s Secondaries strategy is global in remit and targets secondary LP interests in a defined universe of fund types: special situations credit, private credit and direct lending, natural resources, infrastructure, real estate and other ‘hard asset’ backed private equity. The strategy explicitly avoids the growth equity, venture capital and traditional buyout portfolios that dominate the standard secondaries market, where Cross Ocean argues that competition, pricing and information efficiency are all correspondingly higher.
Within their universe, Cross Ocean’s focus is on late-life funds. The strategy targets harvest-phase and liquidation-phase interests, static portfolios and vehicles already actively returning capital, driven by two primary reasons:
- Motivated sellers concentrate late in a fund’s life — as fund term extensions loom, LPs become materially more willing to transact at price levels driven by liquidity and portfolio management rationale rather than intrinsic value.
- Late-life assets are more tractable to underwrite — with the investment period closed, the underlying portfolio composition is fixed, cash flows are more visible, and intrinsic value assessment becomes a matter of fundamental company- and asset-level analysis rather than forecasting future deployments.
The late-life focus is underpinned by Cross Ocean’s second feature: intrinsic value underwriting rather than GP-quality underwriting. The team underwrites secondary deals from the bottom-up, focusing on the underlying assets themselves and portfolio company value, asset-level cash flows, capital-structure attachment and detachment points and liquidation pathways.
The combination of late-life sourcing, sector selectivity and intrinsic-value discipline aims to produce a materially wider entry discount vs. the market average. Cross Ocean cites a typical secondaries market NAV discount of 8%–25%, against its own target range of 20%–50%. The wider corridor is attributed to genuinely lower competition in the strategy’s target segments, lower pricing transparency on the underlying assets, greater portfolio complexity and the specialist expertise required to underwrite them.
The overarching investment framework is consistent with the firm’s broader credit DNA. Recurring criteria in every underwriting include: motivated sellers; high cash-on-cash return potential; shorter duration than typical PE secondaries; hard asset backing; a top-of-capital-structure bias; exposure to out-of-favour and dislocated sectors; and intensive sourcing through relationships built over the founding team’s careers.
Team and Operational Infrastructure
Cross Ocean’s Secondaries strategy has a deliberate structural feature that LPs should understand upfront. The strategy is not built around a standalone secondaries team led by a marquee secondaries investor. The firm has instead added secondaries sourcing and execution infrastructure to its existing credit underwriting platform and team members, rather than assembling a separate group.
Cross Ocean operates with two co-CIOs, Graham Goldsmith and Steve Zander. Goldsmith (CEO and Co-CIO) has 35 years of industry experience, having previously served as Global Head of Credit and Special Situations at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, where he ran the global credit business for over 20 years. He has spent 11 years with Cross Ocean and its predecessor platform. Zander (Head of Europe and Co-CIO) has 37 years of industry experience, was a founding Senior Partner and CIO at HayFin and previously served as Managing Director and Co-Head of the global loan and special situations group at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, where he worked alongside Goldsmith for seven years.
Directly beneath, the two heads of research provide the fundamental credit analysis capability that drives Cross Ocean’s intrinsic-value underwriting across all strategies, including secondaries:
- Steven Heanly, Head of European Research — 37 years of industry experience; a founding partner of Cross Ocean; previously Head of European Special Situations at Angelo Gordon.
- Nick Renwick, Head of US Research — 29 years of industry experience; previously an analyst at King Street Capital.
Cross Ocean’s four portfolio managers have an average of 25+ years of investment experience each; the sourcing infrastructure is anchored on relationships built over the founding team’s careers across banks, sponsors and corporates.
Portfolio and Performance
To date, Cross Ocean has reportedly executed on 19 transactions, representing c.$2.0bn in deal volume out of its first secondaries fund. Average transaction sizes have sat around $108m with average remaining fund lives being c.2.1 years, in keeping with the fund’s tail-end focus. Notably, for a secondaries GP, Cross Ocean states that positions are initially carried at cost, with valuation marks moving only in response to portfolio developments or observed underlying transactions. Given the emphasis on bottom-up asset and cash flow underwriting, this typically means that performance comes from cash coming back, rather than from valuation uplift.
Fundraising
Cross Ocean’s Secondaries strategy is currently deployed through the Cross Ocean Global Secondaries Fund I, which closed at $750m in December 2025. The firm is expected to be back to market later in 2026.
If you have a manager you think should be featured for “Manager of the Month”, or you are a GP and would like to be featured, reach out to contact@lpgateway.com with your suggestion.
