Private credit grew from a niche corner of the lending market into a multi-trillion-dollar asset class largely out of public view, funded by pension plans, endowments and insurers who understood exactly what they were buying: illiquid loans to mid-sized companies, priced at a premium to public debt, held to maturity by investors who would never need the money back early. The structure matched the asset. Long money funded long loans.

That match is now being dismantled, and it's happening for the most understandable reason in finance. The institutional market is saturated, returns have compressed as capital flooded in, and the obvious source of new money is the enormous pool of individual investor assets that has never had access. Interval funds, non-traded business development companies, evergreen vehicles and tender-offer funds are all mechanisms for pointing retail capital at private loans. Distribution has expanded fast, and the industry has been explicit that individual investors are the next growth engine.

The CFA Institute published research in July examining exactly this shift, and its focus is telling: The report treats market structure, fund design and retail access as a single interlocking question rather than three separate ones. That's the right frame, because the risk in retail private credit is not primarily about the underlying loans. It's about the container they're being sold in.

What Interval Funds Really Promise

Consider what an interval fund actually promises. Investors can redeem, but only during periodic windows and only up to a capped percentage of fund assets —........

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