Patrick: Well, I grew up in Western Mass. I was born on Westover Air Force Base, and I grew up in a small town called Wilbraham, which is the home of Friendly’s Ice Cream. If you've driven west on the Mass Pike, you've seen our topiary sign that says, "Welcome to Wilbraham, home of Friendly's." I know what job I'm terrible at. I was a waiter — a terrible waiter. It’s a little too much for ... It's not great for someone with a little touch of Attention Deficit Disorder.

Stewart: Yeah, I understand. What job would you like to have, though? I mean, is there anything that you'd say, "Man, if things were different, I'd be a — whatever it is.”

Patrick: I always think I'd like to be a chef, but I think that's more theoretical than actual, because I think that's a hard life.

Stewart: I can relate to that. I can tell you this, every time I cook this and that. And then I watch TV, I watch people who are really good cooks, and I'm like, I don't do any of that. It just shows you, I really don’t know what I'm doing. So, let's start it off. I mean, at the top of the show, we talked about the difficulty in defining infrastructure, it means a lot of things. And from your perspective, what characteristics does an asset need to truly qualify as infrastructure, and how is that different from traditional corporate or middle market private credit?

Patrick: Yes, sure. I mean, we always start with that when we meet with clients or prospects. At MIM, infrastructure's pretty simple. I think we share a similar definition with many other people. It's basically a physical system, a physical asset or system that provides an essential service to support the public or the economy and has limited competition and/or high barriers to entry. So back in the twenty-teens, infrastructure really became kind of hot. It was an investing term, quite frankly, that we saw getting slapped on a lot of things, but really what was happening is we were seeing middle market borrowers putting infrastructure on their deals because they realized, “Wait a minute, infrastructure means I can get longer-tenor debt, cheaper.” So they were trying to get their 9% deals for service companies’ 15-year money at 5%. But I think the best way to describe it is maybe with an example, right?

The airport is the infrastructure asset, right? Not the service provider at the airport or the business that is needed for the planes, even though they may have great revenues. If they wash the planes or paint the planes, they could be great businesses, but they're not infrastructure.

Stewart: Are the planes?

Patrick: The planes are not infrastructure, they're equipment.

Stewart: They would be in an asset-based finance (ABF) deal.

Patrick: Yeah, exactly. That's why you see them in enhanced equipment trust certificates, right?

Stewart: Yeah. I mean, look, you have to educate the host along the way. All right. So access and origination. So how do insurers, and you said in an interesting seat, right? How do insurers actually access infrastructure debt on your platform, and how do you access the deals? I mean, I've talked about deal flow. Deal flow is a significant differentiator; we talk about it on a lot of podcasts.

Patrick: Yes.

Stewart: So just talk us through that.

Patrick: Right. You hit it. There are two prongs to accessing infrastructure debt. There's access to the asset class, which we, like other managers, offer in separate managed accounts, funds of one. We're in the process of developing a co-mingled high-yield infrastructure debt fund. And for our insurance clients, we are putting together a rated feeder fund for a capital-efficient solution. And then second, there's the asset access. That's the origination you're talking about. And that's where having your name on the side of the stadium is hugely helpful. Given we're an asset manager owned by one of the largest U.S. insurers, we see everything in the broadly syndicated market. We're also typically among the first calls on limited distribution and club deals. And, just to put it into context, over the past five years, we've invested over $30 billion in infrastructure debt. And during that timeframe, over 35% of our investments were directly originated deals, with sponsors, issuers and other managers who call us for club deals, because we try to be a good partner to everyone, because ultimately we're sort of deal-source agnostic.

We'd like everybody to make money doing a deal. We just want to get good deals for our clients. So that's our philosophy

Stewart: I don't want to put words in your mouth here, but I've learned elsewhere that longevity in a market matters. You become known, what you're interested in, and how you do things, and that can influence that deal flow. I mean, is that fair? You guys have been doing this for a long time. It's not new to you, but that's got to help you with relationships over time.

Patrick: Yes, there it is. The R word, relationship. And we talk about that a lot actually. You want to be commercial as a lender, because we actually view clients in two ways. We have clients whose money we manage, and we have clients who are our borrowers. We want repeat business from both. We have to be commercial with our borrowers, and we have to be looking out for the interests of our clients whose money we manage. So a relationship doesn't mean doing non-economic things for our borrowers. At some point you have to say, “Put yourself in their shoes.” We manage money for these people. Relationship doesn't mean doing things that don't make sense. So you do hear the R word a lot from borrowers, and it means different things to different people. What it means to us is communicating very clearly what we can and can't do for borrowers. And then if we say we can do something, we do it. And then it’s also being really clear about what we can't do and sticking to that.

Stewart: Yes, it's super important. And it leads me into this discipline in today's market segment. We're in a tighter-spread, more sponsor-friendly environment. I'd like you to help me unpack what ‘sponsor-friendly environment’ means to you. How important is it right now to have the discipline to walk away or to try and restructure deals instead of simply deploying capital? And I would tack onto this, because I've been on the other end of it. When you have scale, that improves your negotiating position. Is that a fair statement?

Patrick: Yes, it’s a fair statement. When you're viewed as an anchor in a deal, you can drive terms. In the syndicated market, when people have already penciled you in for a quarter of the deal, and these terms don't work, suddenly they're rethinking what they had already penciled in for the book. I mean, a sponsor-friendly environment is when there's a lot of money in the market chasing deals. And certainly in the investment-grade space, where deals are regularly four times, five times oversubscribed, I mean, you can clear deals tighter on pricing and weaker on terms. In credit, there are three areas where you need discipline. Credit, this is obvious. You have to pick good assets with proven technology, operating track records, reliable cash flow, but everyone should be trying to do this.

Pricing, I would say the infrastructure debt market has an inherent sort of pricing discipline, in part because it's part of the private placement, private debt market, which prices things on a relative value basis to the public market. So there's already some discipline just inherently built in there. And then our clients will ensure that we maintain that discipline, because we have to deliver value to them, otherwise they're not going to let us manage their money anymore. So those two things have some self-governance to them. It's the structures really where we are seeing more aggressive terms, and it's where you can be tempted to say, in a benign credit environment, maybe let something slide. Now, I mean, I learned early on — because I came from the legal side — that I could really lean into structure, but it was also drummed into me, “Structure doesn't pay you back, cash flow does.” So, we've been seeing terms pushed in this market, and we've definitely been pushing back on things like debt service coverage ratios that have cash flow lockups, but not in the event of defaults or people asking issuers to waive yield maintenance provisions and fixed-rate bond deals years ahead of the maturity.

This will give an issuer a one-way option to pay you back when rates go down, but they get to keep your money when rates go up. But it's that yield maintenance, the make-whole, the sacred make-whole that allows insurers to go long on debt. So you don't want to be setting bad precedents just because you want to put money to work.

Stewart: I'm glad that you mentioned structure, because that leads me to my next question, which is this: Infrastructure debt really lives and dies on structure. How does your experience across both legal and investment sides influence how you approach deals? I mean, not everybody has a JD from Duke, right? That's got to be an advantage.

Patrick: Yeah. I'm not sure how I got in. I'm really a state school kid but…

Stewart: You're talking to a guy from Imperial Missouri with an MBA from the Booth School of Business. Nobody thought that ... I was like, "There's got to be a mistake. There's no way they've let me in here."

Patrick: Yes, I hear you. They let one pass the goalie every now and then. That's right. Yes, I hear you. But I mean, structure is incredibly important — it's always important. The problem is when the times are good, it's easy to forget that, and you just don't want to remember that during a downturn. You have to remember it all the time. It's easy to say that, but during a period when the spreads are tight, and competition for bonds is high, the structures get pushed. And that's exactly what happened before the financial crisis in public bonds and covenant-lite loans. But the strong performance of insurers’ investment-grade, private placement portfolios is why people increase their allocation to that asset class. So, as a leading infrastructure debt investor, we really think it's important to maintain discipline on structures for a couple of reasons. One, obviously for our clients, but we also don't want to set bad precedents in the market, like I said before.

But I will also say to your listeners out there, if there are any other infrastructure debt investors listening to this podcast, and I know there are, if you're being told by a banker that you are the only one asking for a common sense covenant, I assure you that MetLife Investment Management is also asking for that covenant. We've all been told “you're the only one asking for it,” and that's not true. So anyway, what's the point? Our view is — what's the point of being one of the largest investors in the market if you're not working to drive the best terms for your clients and for the market?

Stewart: Yes, it's a great point. I appreciate the fact that you're on the same side of the table in many ways. So there's been a lot of talk around digital infrastructure lately. There's been a lot of capital flow there, and it really brings underwriting challenges, especially around power availability and construction risks and all that sort of stuff. I do think that it's rattling around in the back of some minds, including mine, that say, given the quantum leap in AI that we’ve just achieved — is there going to be a quantum leap in power requirements that reduce the ... I go back to incandescent bulbs versus LEDs. So I look at that, and I have a very uneducated view there. This is like common Imperial Missouri walking-around sense, but talk to us about digital infrastructure. What is the real situation there, and are you concerned?

Patrick: Yes, I mean, maybe I'll focus on the power piece of it first, because a very large part of infrastructure finance in the United States is related to power and energy. I mean, you know this, right? As a former city treasurer, most core infrastructure like roads, bridges and airports in the U.S. are financed in the municipal bond market, not the private infrastructure debt market. Recently, we've seen a big shift in electricity demand. For 20 years, 2000 to 2020, year-over-year growth was 0% to maybe 0.5%. Recently, we've seen a big acceleration in electricity demand, like five times. It's projected to be 2.5% year-over-year growth. So what's driving demand? There are three things: first, reindustrialization and domestic manufacturing. Think the CHIPS Act, like the Intel plant in Ohio, the Inflation Reduction Act, and post-COVID supply chain resilience investments. Then there's the electrification of transportation and buildings. That's like the Teslas and the convection ovens. Here’s a dirty little secret. I prefer a nice gas stove to ... that's the fake chef in me.

Stewart: I will not share this. Don't worry.

Patrick: And then, data centers. Okay. There's your digital infrastructure. It's not an infrastructure podcast unless you mention data centers today. And data centers are the biggest driver of load demand increase in the United States. In 2023, they consumed over 4% of the electricity in the United States. And by 2028, they're estimated to consume like 7% to 12% of electricity in the United States. It's a real positive for power project developments. It's a boon to power energy prices. But getting to your point, it's also one of my concerns about power projects because in 2026, gas prices spiked, and a lot of hydro projects put on more debt because gas prices correlate with energy prices. Hydro projects can put on more debt when energy prices go up, because they follow the energy price, and you size debt off the energy prices. Well, what happened in 2007? Oh, the shale gas revolution occurred, right?

And then we saw for over a decade — a one-way price of gas, which was down. So all of those projects were overleveraged. That's kind of what I worry about now when I look at anything with merchant power exposure. That's the thing that kind of rattles around in the back of my head and is my concern. So again, this is where discipline and structure matter. When you have merchant power in a deal, you have to hold the line on assumptions and model inputs. You have to structure the deals properly with cash flow sweeps and defeasance accounts, and quite frankly, how much merchant power you allow in your deals. I mean, you can push the rating agencies to get that BBB- rating with some merchant in there, but you have to really be disciplined to hold the line, because we don't know what's going to happen.

And I'll tell you, if there's a power deal, I know one thing that is absolutely wrong in the deal, and that is the future forecast merchant price. Now, it may be wrong to the upside or the downside, but it's wrong. Nobody knows what the price in the future is going to be. So you have to structure the deal properly.

Stewart: Yes, it's a great point. And you've brought up some things that make so much sense that I hadn't really considered before, so I'm just kind of sitting here taking it in. You were really clear earlier about defining what infrastructure is, but my question is really about the lines blurring between asset classes. Infrastructure, real estate and even ABF are all financing similar assets. That's how the question reads, but is that really true? And how do you manage across those boundaries?

Patrick: That's a great question. It's one of the reasons why I spent a little bit of time in private asset-based finance because we saw this happening. We saw infrastructure assets being financed in asset-based finance structures. So it was like this. The asset is the asset, but then how you finance it moves it from one asset class to another. We saw project finance structures being overlaid onto corporate type credits. You want the right people underwriting the right structures and the right substantive assets. So you have to bring the right people to the deals. I mean, MetLife Investment Management is a big asset manager. Following our recent merger with PineBridge, we have 1,100 clients and 35 offices. Our clients love it because we have one-stop shopping for multiple asset classes. You can have individual investment team discipline, but when you're in a large firm, you need coordination and communication across the teams.

Data centers are the latest, greatest example of this. They started popping up in people's portfolios like mushrooms because they were coming off different desks at banks. And I'm pretty sure the people on those desks at the banks weren't talking to each other. They were sending them on to the desks at the asset managers where they had their contacts, and that was the real estate desk, the asset-backed securities desk, the project finance desk and the private placement desk. So to deal with that, we formed a digital infrastructure strategy group to coordinate exposure limits, harmonize investment views. Now I didn't say come up with the same investment views, because you can play different types of assets in different asset classes differently. You can go short and liquid for a credit that you don't have a great long-term view on.

You can go long and illiquid for someone where you believe in the underlying credit for a long time. It's going to be really robust, and then you can match it with the right portfolio. That's what the ALM guys like. And then through this group, we sort of adopt best practices, share knowledge across groups. So further example, members of the infrastructure debt team will sit in on the private ABF investment committee for a data center deal, and we'll opine on the asset. They don't ask us about their tranching and their step-up after the ARD. I don't think most people on the infrastructure debt team know what an ARD is.

Stewart: I know your host does not. What is an ARD?

Patrick: Anticipated repayment date.

Stewart: Oh, there you go.

Patrick: That's when you're supposed to be paid off in the ABS world. So that's like their maturity date. So another example of data centers is this: You can book them as mortgages on Schedule B, and we would have to work with our real estate group to do that. So you have to coordinate across asset classes, but it's really important, especially if you're managing the same client's money in an asset class. They don't want to wake up someday and realize they're triple-filled on data centers.

Stewart: It’s a really good point to make about the need to coordinate risk exposures for carriers that may be different managers or have different asset classes on their label, but actually have similar ... I saw a research report somewhere that said business development companies (BDCs), the largest BDCs have something like a 30% overlap in exposures. And that's a great example — I'm sure that wasn't the goal when they set out. That just seems outsized.

So it's been a great education on infrastructure. I sincerely mean that. I've learned a lot. As we wrap up, how should insurers be thinking about infrastructure debt today within the broader portfolio? A lot of times it's about fit in an insurance portfolio. You don't lead with performance. You lead with — what is it, and what's the shape of the puzzle piece that fits in my… Is this piece number 498 in my 500-piece puzzle? So how should insurers think about infrastructure debt today within everything else that they're doing?

Patrick: Yes, sure. I mean, generally, most insurers seeking access to infrastructure debt are thinking it's capital efficient. The investment-grade debt is very capital efficient from a risk-based capital charge, and they view it as mainly an extension of a core fixed-income strategy, useful for asset liability matching. They like it because it's not necessarily as correlated to the swings of GDP as traditional corporate debt. They can pick up a spread premium relative to the ... I mean, in 2025, we were at all-time tights in terms of spread. Some CIOs have asked, "Maybe we should just put it all in Treasuries." And then they say, "Well, we can't put it all in Treasuries." So they have to put it somewhere. They look for the spread where they can add value. Infrastructure's also — it's a natural diversifier, not just because of the way it doesn't correlate. These are all things that are explained in the well-known Moody study about low volatility in terms of rating and higher recoveries and defaults, but it's also a global asset class.

Inherently, it's different types of assets and different types of jurisdictions. So there's a wide array of investment opportunities. That's generally why people are seeking exposure to it. They're just trying to fill in a gap in their fixed-income portfolio. That's the main reason why people come see us. And then the other reason why people come see us is to get access to infrastructure debt. Oftentimes, we're like the plus one at a wedding. Most insurers have an investment team, and they really just want access to the pipeline and “What are we not seeing?” They get the broadly syndicated stuff, and they want access… Since we see the club deals, we do the direct origination, and they'll say, show us what you have, and we're happy to do that. So come along for the ride.

Stewart: Absolutely. All right. Fun one's on the way out. Ready?

Patrick: All right.

Stewart: You've been at this for a minute here and there. Over the course of your career, what characteristics make a good investment professional? Or said differently, what characteristics are you looking for when you're adding to members of your team?

Patrick: Obviously, good people. That means somebody you want to spend time with. If I had to boil it down to one word, it'd be horsepower. And I mean, I tell this to my analyst when I'm interviewing. Horsepower is kind of three things. There's smarts. That's, can I work a model? Do I know finance? Did I have a good GPA? But generally people, you're smart enough. At some point you're smart enough. We're not curing cancer here. Finance is generally long division and a bunch of acronyms. Work ethic, you have to put in the time, you have to get the reps to be good at something. The last one is harder. You really have to enjoy what you do, and you don't necessarily know that with the younger people. They have to do one and two to find out.

But if you can put all three of them together, then I want everybody to be great at what they do. I think they deserve to be, and you have to enjoy it. I happen to really like infrastructure debt. It's why I'm excited by it. And I think everybody deserves that. You spend a lot of time at work, so you deserve to enjoy what you do. I hope for all three. If I can get those people on my team, wow, that's fantastic.

Stewart: One of the things that I like best about this podcast is that there are people who are excited by things that I think are equally about the same caliber as what I'm excited about — which is the well-documented leader of insurance asset management in the school parade. So you love infrastructure, and I think insurance asset management's cool. All right, last one. You can have dinner. Dinner's on us, by the way. You can have dinner with up to three people. You can have one, two or three. Who would you most like to have a dinner with, alive or dead?

Patrick: All right. I'm going to go for three people.

Stewart: Nice.

Patrick: The first two were easy. So I was an undergrad history major. I read No Ordinary Time by Doris Kerns Goodwin, and I thought FDR was fantastic because during World War II, when he would squirrel up in the White House, he would shut down at the end of the day, and he would play cards and have cocktails. So we're going to have dinner, we're going to start with cocktails, but we're not going to get too crazy, because the second person is going to be Muhammad Ali. I met him once. This is like…

Stewart: Oh, wow.

Patrick: He had pugilistic Parkinson's, but the guy still had charisma, right? Oh yeah. But he's a teetotaler, so we're going to have fun but not get crazy. The third one was hard. I live in Western Mass, and I live across from Smith College, and it hit me, Julia Child. Now, you may not know this about her, but she was an agent in the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA. So she and FDR would get along, and she was actually 6'2", so she could hang with Muhammad Ali.

Stewart: I didn't know that.

Patrick: She’d definitely know a French restaurant where we could run up your tab.

Stewart: I like it. All right, that's good stuff. That's a good table. Kudos to you on that one. That's good. Great education on infrastructure today. I really appreciate it. And it's been very nice to have you on, Patrick. Thank you.

Patrick (30:29): Yes, I appreciate it. I enjoyed it. Thanks, Stewart

Stewart: Good deal. So we've been joined today by Patrick Manseau, CFA, managing director, head of infrastructure debt for the Americas and Asia Pacific at MetLife Investment Management. If you like what we're doing, please rate us, review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. You can watch us on video on our new YouTube channel. It's actually not too new, at InsuranceAUM Community on YouTube. My name's Stewart Foley. Thanks for listening. You're at the home of the world's smartest money at InsuranceAUM.com.

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