Larry Kravetz, Kristin Khanna and Frank Gilhool

When it comes to power, some teams show you don’t have to be the biggest fish in the pond to create an almighty splash. Barclays sent water particles flying to the tune of $11.5 billion this past year. 

“We’ve been very active across the board, and we’re very proud of what we do,” Larry Kravetz said. “I think we do incredibly well competing with bigger balance sheets as a smaller shop, and our transaction volume speaks to our quality, how creative we are, and our ability to be a top-tier provider of capital with the top-tier borrowers in the country.” 

Barclays continued to prove itself as a leader in SASB and conduit CMBS, balance sheet loans, warehouse financing and acquisition facilities, transacting across asset classes including one that’s been top of mind for many on this list: data centers. The firm was a key source of capital for the rapid expansion of the data center space, and has either led or co-led 75 percent of data center SASBs since 2021.

“I’ve never seen anything close to this, in terms of the amount of capital going into one sector,” Kravetz said. “The dollar amounts you’re hearing on a monthly and annual basis from our clients are staggering — the many billions of dollars that they’re projecting, and the need to access every source of capital, whether it’s CMBS, ABS [asset-backed securities], project finance, or other areas of balance sheet financing. And this is probably an overstatement, but not dramatic: I think every lender in the world is looking at how they can be part of this.”  

Barclays has a competitive advantage over the newer kids on the block, having been transacting in the data center space for years now. 

“I think it’s a real advantage because, like Larry said, these clients are growing so quickly that they need to be thinking about different capital sources, and how to diversify those capital sources at each stage of their asset life cycle,” Kristin Khanna said. “Having a seat at the table really early in that growth phase with some of these big take-privates and some of these companies that are really expanding and pivoting towards hyperscaling has been a competitive advantage, because I think the CMBS space in particular is really set up to serve those sorts of structures in a way that is complementary to ABS.”

There were several notable deals for the team last year, including the $500 million balance sheet refinancing of Blackstone’s Jupiter industrial portfolio; the left lead role in the KIND Commercial Mortgage Trust 2024-1 transaction; and as one of the lead banks on Blackstone’s $10 billion take-private of AIR Communities, providing and funding a backstop that was then taken out by the BX AIRC and BX AIR2 SASB transactions.

“For the past 12 months, given all of the challenges that have faced the market, the theme has been client service —and it’s really been about working with clients,” Frank Gilhool said. “A lot of what we do is three-year floating-rate loans, and so many of our loans are coming off the peak of originations in `21 and `22, so a lot of those loans are up for maturity and requiring a lot of hand-holding with regards to loan mods.” 

Right now, Barclays is working on around 12 repo facilities for existing clients. “The positive feedback on that is, these are clients that are now working on funds III, IV, V, and we’ve been lending to them throughout,” Gilhool said. “There’s been a decent amount of new capital-raising activity that’s occurred with new clients and we have around six term sheets right now that we’re working on converting to new client facility activity. So both sides of the business relationship — new and existing — have been solid. The new side is somewhat gratifying, because usually that’s word of mouth, and getting solid feedback from the market is always reassuring.” 

In terms of 2025, despite an economy slowing from the tariff war, Barclays’ pipeline is “historically strong at this point in the year, not only coming up to this point, but going forward for both SASB and conduit and then balance sheet,” Kravetz said. “We’re having real-time conversations with our clients where they’re asking, ‘Do I go balance sheet? Do I go SASB?’ We can offer both, and so things actually feel very strong across the board but, of course, we’ll see where the world goes.”