Zito: Asset Managers Cannot Easily M&A Their Way Into Credit Origination
John Zito · How Apollo Built an $800 Billion Capital Markets Giant | John Zito Interview · Invest Like The Best · Jun 3, 2025 · at 19:43
John Zito, Co-President of Apollo Asset Management, explains why competitors face structural barriers trying to quickly acquire credit origination capabilities.
0:00 / 0:37exact quote · 37.5s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“It's very hard to M&A your way into the business, because there's a origination culture that's been built here for 1520 years. I mean, just in credit. And to align yourself in a principle way, and to actually be able to talk, the origination isn't just having a bunch of sorcerers finding risk. Origination is also the understanding what fits our balance sheet and how we think about risk and reward. Very hard to scale if you haven't worked with those people and really have a clear understanding and clear narrative about what works and what doesn't work.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from John Zito
Zito: Principal-focused asset management models will beat agent-focused models
“We're building effectively a more merchant focused, principal focused, not agent focused asset manager. And we think that, that model's gonna win.”
Zito: Private Credit Firms Are Becoming Primary Lenders to S&P 500
“We're in the middle of this just generational shift in the way everything gets capitalized, and the traditional relationship between investor asset manager, bank asset manager, S&P 500 issuer, and private alternative firm that is deemed to be more, you know, m…”
Zito: Delivering 15%+ returns in alternatives without zero rates seems really hard
“We've raised all these pools of capital under a construct that all of these alternative products should make 15% plus rates of return in all different environments without the subsidy of effectively zero to negative rates. That seems hard. Seems really hard.”
Zito: Tokenized Quarterly Liquid Funds Will Eventually Trade 24/7
“We're experimenting with, you know, what we listed our first fund on blockchain with five different protocols, and we're tokenizing the fund, where I think funds will actually trade. And even though they're quarterly liquid, they'll trade every day, three 65, …”
Apollo Allocates Its $300B Athene Balance Sheet 95% to Investment Grade
“And with that brought on close to half our balance sheet, just over three hundred billion dollars today of our own balance sheet, which we're investing every day, 95% investment grade, five percent alternatives.”
Zito: Long-Duration Annuities Naturally Fit Infrastructure Financing
“The beautiful thing about annuities is it's,
Long duration liabilities. What beautiful thing about retirement, long duration in terms of the life, 10, 2030, 50 years in some cases. That matches really well with long duration infrastructure projects. So the nat…”