HPS Investment Partners: What the BlackRock Deal Means for the Interview

Type "HPS Investment Partners" into a search engine and its own homepage still introduces itself as a leading alternative credit manager, with nothing about BlackRock anywhere in the page's title or its description. Follow two links deeper, into the firm's own history page, and it says plainly: HPS became a part of BlackRock in July 2025.

Both of those are true at once, and the gap between them is the honest place to start. HPS did not vanish into BlackRock's name the way some acquired firms do. It kept its brand, its offices and its founding partners, while becoming, underneath, a business line inside the world's largest asset manager. Getting that structure right — and getting the very different numbers each side now publishes right — matters here more than almost anywhere else on this roster.

$197bn

HPS private and liquid credit AUM

30 June 2026, HPS's own figure

1 July 2025

BlackRock acquisition closed

~$12bn, paid entirely in BlackRock stock

0

open roles on HPS's own job board

worldwide, checked 8 September 2026

HPS Investment Partners at a glance

Every figure above is dated because every one of them will move; the two AUM lines especially should never be quoted without their dates attached.

The angle: two numbers, and they measure two different things

This is the single easiest fact to get wrong about HPS, and it is exactly the kind of thing an interviewer tests for precision on.

$197bn — HPS's own figure

• HPS's own site, dated 30 June 2026
• Scoped to private and liquid credit only
• HPS's book, on its own

$381bn+ — BlackRock's own figure

• BlackRock's own site, dated 31 March 2026
• Combined AUM of HPS funds AND BlackRock's own funds
• The whole Private Financing Solutions platform: credit, GP/LP solutions and CLOs together

Neither figure is stale or wrong. BlackRock's own footnote is explicit about what the larger number contains: HPS's funds plus BlackRock's own funds, across a platform that is wider than credit alone. Add the two together, or quote one as a rounder version of the other, and both numbers stop meaning anything.

There is a third figure floating around too, worth naming so a candidate is not thrown by it: some of BlackRock's own recruiting material still quotes a Private Financing Solutions total closer to $370bn, from language written before the firm's public marketing page moved to $381bn+.

That gap is not a conspiracy, just two teams updating a live number on different schedules. It is one more reason to lead with the scope of a figure rather than the figure alone.

Never write Highbridge Principal Strategies

HPS did not start under its current name, and the old one is a trap for exactly the reason GSO is a trap on the Blackstone side of this roster: it signals a candidate stopped reading years ago.

• 2007 — Scott Kapnick, Scot French and Michael Patterson, all formerly of Goldman Sachs, found the unit as Highbridge Principal Strategies, the private equity and credit arm of J.P. Morgan Asset Management's Highbridge hedge fund business.
• 2008–2015 — the unit builds out a junior credit strategy, a London office, Specialty Direct Lending, Core Senior Lending and an Asia-Pacific presence, growing toward roughly $22bn in assets by the mid-2010s.
• March 2016 — HPS's principals buy the business out of J.P. Morgan Asset Management, and it is renamed HPS Investment Partners, one of the largest employee-owned managers created that way.
• 1 July 2025 — HPS becomes a part of BlackRock, inside the new Private Financing Solutions unit.

Three eras, three names, and only the last two describe anything that still exists. Highbridge itself is a separate, still-independent hedge fund manager that kept the original name after the 2016 split — a second reason not to reach for it when describing HPS today.

HPS is not alone on this roster in having just finished an ownership change. Oaktree Capital went from majority-owned to fully owned by Brookfield the same year, and the same discipline applies to both: say what is true now, not what was true when the story was easier to remember.

The decade that built a $100bn business

HPS grew from a niche credit strategy inside a bank into a firm large enough for BlackRock to pay roughly $12bn for it, and the growth was steady rather than sudden.

~2015

$22bn

2023

$100bn

2026

$197bn

Three snapshots, not a series: the gaps between them are roughly eight years and then three, so any line drawn through them would misstate the rate. What the figures support is that HPS was already large and growing well before BlackRock's approach.

The milestones between those snapshots are concrete. In February 2022, HPS launched its first non-traded lending vehicle for individual investors, the HPS Corporate Lending Fund (HLEND), and separately took a minority investment from insurer Guardian Life, which began seeding capital across HPS's private credit strategies at a time HPS reported roughly $80bn under management.

HPS crossed $100bn in assets in 2023. In June 2024, it closed its sixth Specialty Loan Fund with $21.1bn in investable capital — a raise the firm's own release described as following two record fund closes the year before.

None of that reads like a distressed seller. It reads like a firm compounding scale on its own, which is the more useful frame for a candidate than "HPS got bought" on its own.

The fund that gated

HPS's retail-facing vehicle gives away more about the risk sitting inside this business than any AUM figure does, and the moment it mattered most happened on BlackRock's own watch, not HPS's.

HLEND had grown into a $26bn portfolio by early 2026. On 6 March 2026, shareholders asked to redeem $1.2bn in a single quarter, roughly 9.3% of the fund's net asset value, against a standing 5% quarterly repurchase limit. BlackRock paid out $620m and capped the rest — the first time the fund had ever hit that limit — and BlackRock's own shares fell more than 7% that day.

A later report noted the fund hit its 5% cap again the following quarter, against redemption requests covering 13.3% of shares.

This is the plainest illustration of what "part of a public company" now means for HPS. A liquidity event inside HPS's own investor base before mid-2025 stayed inside HPS's own investor base. In 2026, the same kind of event moved BlackRock's stock price within a single trading day — and being able to explain why a gate protects long-term lenders, rather than treating it as evidence something broke, is a stronger answer than most candidates walk in with.

What HPS actually does

Corporate Private Credit

$131bn

Asset-Based Finance

$39bn

Liquid Credit

$27bn

Corporate-focused private credit is the clear center of gravity — about two-thirds of the firm's assets sit there, which is worth knowing before assuming a role sits anywhere else.

The three platforms do genuinely different work, and knowing which one a role sits inside matters more here than the HPS name on the offer letter.

Corporate Private Credit is where most candidates picture HPS working, and it is the largest platform by a wide margin. Within it, HPS's own materials describe offerings spanning the risk spectrum, from performing senior secured lending through junior capital to special-situations investing — so "Corporate Private Credit" alone still covers several genuinely different desks, from underwriting a healthy borrower to working out a stressed one.

Asset-Based Finance is the newer, faster-growing leg, lending against leases, receivables and real estate rather than a single company's cash flow; the analysis leans on collateral performance and pool structuring rather than management diligence. Liquid Credit is a trading business at heart, closer in rhythm to a markets desk than to a deal team, moving in and out of syndicated loans, bonds and securitized credit as relative value shifts.

The IPO that never happened

Eighteen months before BlackRock's name entered the picture, HPS was headed somewhere else entirely.

In November 2023, HPS confidentially filed paperwork with the SEC in preparation for a possible public listing. By September 2024, it was reportedly discussing that listing with prospective investors, at a valuation that could have topped $10bn, with AUM then running around $117bn. Three months later, in December 2024, BlackRock announced its agreement to buy the firm outright instead.

That sequence is worth holding onto precisely, because it changes the story a candidate should tell. HPS was not a firm in trouble that BlackRock rescued. It was a firm on a credible path to going public that took a different, larger offer first — roughly $12bn, paid entirely in BlackRock stock, structured with about a quarter of the consideration deferred for five years and a further slice tied to performance.

BlackRock's own release at the time framed the deal as adding roughly 40% to its private-markets fee-paying assets in one transaction, a scale of ambition an IPO alone would not have delivered.

Who runs Private Financing Solutions now

HPS's three founding partners did not step aside when the deal closed. They moved up into BlackRock's own leadership structure.

• Scott Kapnick — Chief Executive Officer of HPS Investment Partners and Chairman of the Private Financing Solutions Executive Office. A Senior Managing Director at BlackRock, a member of its Global Executive Committee, and an observer to BlackRock's own Board of Directors.
• Scot French — Co-President of HPS and portfolio manager for one of its dedicated credit fund families. Also a Senior Managing Director within Private Financing Solutions and a member of BlackRock's Global Executive Committee.
• Michael Patterson — Co-President of HPS, having led its Direct Lending platform. Also a Senior Managing Director within Private Financing Solutions and a member of BlackRock's Global Executive Committee.

All three sitting on BlackRock's own executive committee is a stronger signal than any press-release line about the deal's importance to BlackRock. Acquisitions this size sometimes sideline the acquired firm's leadership within a year or two; this one instead wired HPS's founders directly into how BlackRock itself is run.

Below the founders, HPS kept its own regional and functional leaders rather than folding every seat into a BlackRock title. Its European business is still run day to day by Matthieu Boulanger, HPS's own Head of Europe — a useful detail for anyone applying into an EMEA seat, since the person setting priorities there is an HPS veteran, not a BlackRock transfer.

The insurance money behind the machine

Long before BlackRock arrived, HPS had already built a relationship that answers a lot of what "being part of a much bigger platform" means for the capital behind a deal.

In February 2022, Guardian Life bought a minority equity stake in HPS and agreed to place capital with the firm "across a range of private-credit strategies." That relationship deepened in August 2024, when Guardian expanded the partnership and placed roughly $30bn of assets under HPS's management — capital that predates the BlackRock deal entirely.

Insurance money behaves differently from a typical fund investor's. It is long-dated, matched against decades-long liabilities, and far less likely to be pulled in a downturn than shorter-horizon institutional capital. A team that has to raise a new commingled fund every few years spends real energy on fundraising between deals; a team with a large, semi-permanent insurance mandate behind it spends more of that time on the deals themselves.

HPS had already built meaningful scale on that kind of base before BlackRock's own, much larger insurance and institutional distribution network arrived on top of it. That is the least-quoted part of this acquisition and arguably the most relevant one for a junior: BlackRock did not hand HPS its first taste of patient capital, it added a second, far larger source of the same thing.

What being inside BlackRock actually changes

Strip away the press-release language and three things are genuinely different for a junior joining HPS today, versus joining the independent firm a year ago.

The capital is bigger, and steadier

BlackRock's own combined platform figure, $381bn+, is not HPS's number to quote as its own — but it is the pool of institutional and insurance relationships a deal originated inside PFS can now draw on. A platform that size can underwrite larger facilities alone, hold them longer, and weather a market that turns without needing to syndicate a deal down to survive it.

That matters most on the largest, most complex deals, where being able to write the whole cheque without a club of co-lenders is itself a competitive edge in winning the mandate.

The distribution reaches further

BlackRock's client base spans pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, insurers and wealth-management platforms at a scale HPS never had access to independently. A strategy that HPS originated well but struggled to place with new investors now sits behind one of the largest fundraising and client-relationship machines in finance — a structural advantage a specialist lender several times HPS's old size still cannot always match.

For a junior, that shows up as fewer stalled fundraises and steadier deployment pacing, since the capital behind a strategy is less dependent on any single fund's marketing cycle.

The scrutiny is public, and it moves markets

HLEND's March 2026 redemption cap did not just make an HPS investor unhappy. It moved BlackRock's share price on a public exchange, in front of analysts, journalists and every other BlackRock shareholder.

Working inside a credit business owned by a listed company means quarterly performance is no longer a private conversation with limited partners. It is a line item that can swing a stock the next morning, which raises the bar on how carefully every fund's numbers get checked before they go out the door.

The career path now runs through two organisations, not one

A strong year at HPS is no longer only an HPS story. Kapnick, French and Patterson's seats on BlackRock's Global Executive Committee mean HPS's most senior people are now visible, and evaluated, at the level of BlackRock's own leadership — which raises the ceiling for HPS's best performers and also means HPS is no longer the only, or necessarily the final, internal path upward for someone who joins it.

None of that is a promise. It is what changes structurally when a $197bn specialist becomes one business line inside a firm managing many trillions, and it is the honest answer to a fit question that "we're now part of BlackRock" alone does not actually answer.

The hiring picture: an empty board and a silent careers page

This is where the research got genuinely surprising, and it is worth reporting plainly rather than glossing over.

HPS's own careers page still actively invites applications — "Explore opportunities with HPS," "Apply now" — and routes every one of those buttons to a page that, checked on 8 September 2026, showed no listings at all under "Job Openings." The same result comes back from HPS's own job-board system directly: a request to it returns zero total roles, worldwide, in any function or location.

Individual job postings that used to live on that same board now redirect elsewhere rather than returning an error page, consistent with listings having moved onto BlackRock's own system rather than HPS's page simply breaking.

That "somewhere else" is careers.blackrock.com, which does carry live postings naming Private Financing Solutions and private credit directly, using boilerplate that says outright: "HPS Investment Partners, a part of BlackRock, is a leading global, credit-focused alternative investment manager." So the honest picture has two parts:

1. HPS's standalone hiring channel is effectively gone, even though the page inviting applications through it is still live.
2. BlackRock's own site is where the actual roles sit now — but as things stand, none of BlackRock's campus programme pages list Private Financing Solutions, private credit or HPS as a named function a student can pick.

Where a junior might actually land now

BlackRock's own "Students & Graduates" pages, for both its EMEA and Americas programmes, list the same set of business functions a candidate can apply into:

• Investments — Global Capital Markets, Infrastructure, Investment Product Strategy & Solutions, Investment Research, Portfolio Management, Private Markets Investing, Quantitative Investing.
• Analytics & Risk, Client & Product, Operations, Technology, and Corporate & Strategic — the remaining business areas, none of which name credit or PFS specifically either.

Private Markets Investing is the closest match to a private-credit route, and it is a general line rather than a dedicated PFS or HPS track. That is a real structural difference from how some rival platforms recruit: Blackstone Credit & Insurance, for instance, runs several separate, explicitly named Summer Analyst lines directly inside its own credit and insurance business, not folded into a firmwide bucket — worth comparing directly if both are on a candidate's list.

As of 7 August 2026, roles naming Private Financing Solutions or private credit explicitly on BlackRock's own site skew toward experienced hires, not graduates — two to four years of relevant background, not a first job out of university. A junior candidate's realistic options are BlackRock's general campus programme with a stated interest in private markets, or watching BlackRock's own postings for an entry-level Private Financing Solutions role to appear directly.

Neither is a guarantee of a seat inside HPS's specific desks, which is a genuinely different starting point than applying to a firm that still runs its own dedicated graduate line.

How to prepare for HPS specifically

1. Lead with the current structure, not the old one. Say "HPS, a part of BlackRock, inside Private Financing Solutions" — never "Highbridge," and never describe HPS as independent.
2. Keep the two AUM figures straight. $197bn is HPS's own private-and-liquid-credit book. $381bn+ is BlackRock's combined-platform figure, HPS and BlackRock's funds together. Cite the one that answers the actual question, with its date.
3. Know which of the three platforms a role sits in. Corporate Private Credit, Asset-Based Finance and Liquid Credit are different jobs with different daily rhythms, not interchangeable labels.
4. Have a specific answer for "why HPS, not a pure BlackRock role." The honest one is scale of capital plus a specialist credit culture that survived the acquisition intact, evidenced by its founders now sitting on BlackRock's own executive committee.
5. Do not assume a dead job board means dead hiring. Check careers.blackrock.com directly for Private Financing Solutions and private-credit postings rather than HPS's own site, and expect most current openings to ask for prior experience rather than none.
6. Use the IPO detail if the conversation turns to why HPS sold. It was mid-process toward a public listing, not distressed, when BlackRock's offer arrived — a stronger, more precise answer than assuming the deal was a rescue.
7. Prepare the technical side the way any private credit seat is tested, since none of the above replaces it. The private credit case study breakdown and the most common interview questions apply to HPS's desks as directly as to any other platform's.

The bottom line

HPS Investment Partners is simultaneously the most independent-looking and the most thoroughly absorbed firm on this roster, and both of those things are true on purpose. The brand, the offices and the founders stayed. The capital, the distribution and the governance now run through BlackRock, and HPS's own leadership sits inside BlackRock's own executive committee as a result.

Get the two AUM figures right, retire "Highbridge" to the origin story where it belongs, and go in with a precise answer for what changed and what did not — capital and reach changed enormously; the specialist credit culture, evidenced by who still runs the place, did not. That is a more useful answer than either "HPS is basically BlackRock now" or "HPS is still independent," and it happens to be the true one.

The empty job board is part of the same honest answer, not a separate complaint. HPS's own front door sits closed, and the door worth knocking on is BlackRock's own careers site instead — a small, checkable fact that most candidates walking into a first-round conversation will not have bothered to check.