BDC Software Loan Marks – Mostly What We Expected

Research evidence excerpt

BDC Software Loan Marks – Mostly What We Expected

Financials | Brokers, Banks & Asset Managers

June 17, 2026

Glenn Schorr, CFA BDC Software Loan Marks – Mostly

212-653-9045

glenn.schorr@evercoreisi.com What We Expected

Benjamin Rubin, CFA, CPA Given the heightened attention on software direct lending and 646-551-8502

Benjamin.Rubin@evercoreisi.com investor questions around loan-level valuations, we decided to

John Dunn take a spin through BDC software portfolios for a deeper look

212-446-9455 into this area of private credit. Overall, the takeaways were

John.Dunn@EvercoreISI.com mostly what we expected: BDCs are slowly marking their

Matthew Lyons, CFA software loans lower (relative to BSL price moves), only 5% of

212-336-1709

matthew.lyons@evercoreISI.com industry-wide software loans are valued below 80%, and marks

Sam Wardlow are consistent across GPs – at least most of the time. See below

212-653-9019 for more.

sam.wardlow@evercoreisi.com

Private Marks Are Moving Lower (Just Slowly). Using

PitchBook’s database, we saw that across ~$60bn of BDC-held

software loans (or ~23% of total BDC loans per PitchBook), the

avg. mark fell ~200bps during 1Q26 to 95.4% at 3/31/26, while

the software BSL index decreased ~650bps to 88.5% over the

same period. While this discrepancy and lag may raise a few

questions, it’s important to remember that this isn’t necessarily

a new trend. Private valuations typically lag public market prices

– in both good times and bad – as traded prices can change

quickly with shifts in investor sentiment.

Manageable Cracks…So Far. Digging deeper into the ~$60bn

of BDC-held software loans, we see that the distribution of fair

values is constructive with ~86% of loans marked at 95%+ and

only 5% marked <80%. That said, time will tell whether private