Our origination platform strategy started by looking for really large investments in specialty finance companies. What we've realized is that the opportunity set is much bigger than that.
We've created origination platforms that step into this white space and fulfill the needs of these companies.
The approach primarily focuses on acquiring various types of specialty finance businesses, which relate to businesses that we have a lot of conviction around, and also generate assets that we find very attractive to finance.
Apollo MidCap can provide solutions that other banks and other private lending platforms would not support or would not do. We are offering all the way from ABL to leverage loans, to real estate loans, to the whole spectrum, and Apollo just adds a whole other dimension. It really helps to have that wide array of products to offer them.
Apollo is a one-stop shop for many. We provide a variety of solutions. We have expertise across industries and geographies. We are nimble, and we have capital, and we can move quickly.
Really, the lifeblood of our economy is a mix of the ability to have access to capital, the ability to access that capital quickly, and the ability to have customized solutions. This is what's really driving the growth in our ever-changing economy.
Great! Well, it's my pleasure, on behalf of our entire team, to welcome everyone to today's event. Looks like we have a lively audience here at the Whitby Theater in New York, and many more tuned in on the live stream for this afternoon's Apollo Matinee, as I heard some calling it on the way in. At our Investor Day two years ago, we articulated the three key growth pillars of our business: origination, global wealth, and capital solutions. Today's session will explore the origination pillar, and specifically the platform ecosystem within it. We will also highlight the connection to the capital solutions business, as there's an important linkage between the two. And based on our engagement with all of you, it's clear that both of these areas are of high interest. Let's start with a reminder of what we're aiming for.
Our North Star is to provide excess return per unit of risk. We seek to do this along the entire spectrum, from investment grade all the way up through private equity. And we're doing this for whom? For our clients who need alpha, and in many cases, need retirement income. We have three primary objectives for today. First, we want to illuminate the market trends leading to the growth of private credit, and address how we see the marketplace versus conventional definitions. Think IMAX theater versus iPhone screen. There's a massive difference in experience. Next, we want to identify how we use excess return. Quite simply, we use it to build our business while serving the needs of our clients. And then finally, we want to illustrate how sourcing this excess spread ultimately creates significant value for our shareholders. So on to the agenda.
In a moment, I will hand it to Chris Edson, our co-head of FIG. Chris is one of the chief architects responsible for our platform investments. He is going to deliver our playbook to you and explain exactly how we do what we do. And then, to make it even more tangible, we thought it would be valuable for you to hear directly from a few people who are leading some of these origination businesses day in and day out. We're delighted to have Howard, Shlomo, and Jay provide perspectives on their respective businesses, some of our largest platforms in MidCap, Wheels, and Atlas. Then, Martin is going to tie it all together by translating how origination provides fuel to drive increasing earnings power for Apollo.
The presentation you're about to see represents a significant body of work, so I'd like to take the opportunity to thank my team and many other colleagues across Apollo, as well as at the platforms, for their collective effort, so we could bring this forward to all of you. With that, let's give Chris a warm welcome to the stage, and enjoy the show.
Thanks, Noah. Hi, everyone. I'm Chris Edson. I'm the co-head of our Financial Institutions Group, our FIG team. This is my 16th year at Apollo. I started covering origination platforms, about 10 years ago with the first acquisition of MidCap. It's hard to imagine what this has grown into, and that we have this room together today to talk about what we've built. Today, we have about 100 people in our Financial Institutions Group. There's over 500 people across Apollo that touch these origination platforms and the origination ecosystem on a regular basis. We have 16 origination platforms. There's about $130 billion of assets in these platforms, and there's about 4,000 employees inside these platforms.
This is at a scale where we're generating excess origination volumes, and we're starting to share these origination volumes with third-party co-investors through our marketing team, and also with distribution partners through our capital solutions team. Today, we're gonna walk through some of the key themes across how this powers Apollo and Athene, about the ongoing shift in private credit, which we've talked a lot about publicly.... We'll talk about how we've built this over the last decade. We'll talk about the types of assets we're focused on, which really focuses around the investment grade side of things. We'll walk through our track record, and we'll cover how we think about growth from here. So first, what do these mean for Apollo, and how does Apollo create value off of these?
We create value in two main ways: in creating spread-related earnings, or SRE, and in creating fee-related earnings, or FRE. The spread-related earnings all starts with the equity. We make equity investments the same way you think about us making equity investments anywhere. Everything starts with purchase price matters. Everything starts with downside protection. We're focused on really stable investments into businesses that have long track records of performance. Our returns are primarily driven by the net income generation of this business, not by changes in franchise value or other things like that. These equity investments create platforms. These platforms have origination volumes that we can consume across the rest of Apollo. This drives debt deployment. The way we think about debt deployment is twofold. First, we're looking for high-grade assets that are in excess spread, 200 basis points of excess spread.
And second, we're looking for outsized deployment. We typically think about this as a multiplier effect. We typically think about this as a gearing ratio, and we're looking for about $3-$5 of debt deployment for every $1 of equity deployment. As this has grown to scale, this deployment is driving management fees, and these management fees are also coming from third parties. The scale has allowed us to raise third-party co-investment, and it's allowed us to drive distribution through our capital markets business. This is also creating a positive feedback loop. The excess returns that we're generating from these origination platforms and from the broader origination ecosystem are allowing us to share some of these returns with our annuity holders and our policyholders.
That's increasing the demand for these annuities, and it's helping us grow our balance sheet, which in turn makes us more relevant in the origination ecosystem and more relevant to our potential clients. Our model is unique and really has helped us achieve what we're trying to do here, and it starts with the scale of our balance sheet. Athene, at a $260 billion balance sheet, is incredibly relevant in the overall origination market. This also is facilitated by our long-duration liabilities, and we'll talk a lot about match funding as we go through this. And lastly, we're focused on unique assets, high-grade assets, investment-grade assets. This is very different than traditional funds that are typically focused on more junior credit. We also think there's a potential for a retirement crisis in this country.
There's a significant growth in retirees, and there's a reduction in the potential to be able to generate guaranteed income. All of this is helping provide solutions to this growing problem. How do we think about private credit? Historically, if a company or a consumer needed a loan, they called a bank, and if they were a big enough company, they could access the bond markets. Banks have amazing business models. Banks have very low funding costs, essentially at negative credit spreads. This drives attractive spread income for banks and their business models, but they also provide critical services. They're providing a daily demand or an instant demand deposit. This deposit allows people to have access to their cash, to run and operate their businesses, and it allows consumers to have access to cash to pay their daily expenses.
This does not mean that banks are great holders of long-duration, illiquid assets because of the structure of their liability structure. The changes we're seeing in the financial system are driving diversification of capital providers and providing better match funding on an ongoing basis. The new entrants to private credit are primarily focused on insurance companies, pension funds, and other institutional investors. Insurance and pension funds have long-duration, fixed liabilities, and institutional investors typically invest in fund format, which does not have a maturity. This makes these types of businesses and these types of capital providers the right types of buyers and holders of long-duration, illiquid assets. This is increasing the diversity of capital in the system, and it's giving borrowers more access to credit. A lot of people think that private credit is leverage lending.
These are four recent clips that size the private credit market at about $1.5 trillion and highlight it primarily as being focused on leverage lending or LBO debt. We think private credit is much larger. We think it's about a $40 trillion market, and this is not a new market. These are assets that have been around for decades. These are assets that have sat on bank balance sheets, these are assets that sat on other financial institutions, and these are assets that have been in the capital markets. These are traditional assets like mortgages, like trade finance, like transportation finance. We don't think all private credit is attractive. We're focused on a couple key areas of private credit. We're focused on the investment grade side of things, and we're also focused on structured products and asset-backed finance. What do we like about asset-backed finance?
We like asset-backed finance because it has a long track record of performance... The data on this page shows that investment-grade asset-backed securities have outperformed like-for-like rated corporates over the past couple of decades. You'll also notice that some of the non-investment grade ABS underperformed in a pre-crisis basis. This is because before the crisis, there was a different structure for these securities. They didn't have the same documentation, they didn't have the same diversification. That's all been changed post-crisis, which is why you see that all ABS has outperformed like-for-like credits on a post-crisis basis. Why is this? Why does ABS perform so well? There's a couple of reasons. The first one we always think about is there's no single point of failure. If you lend to a large corporate, there's one corporate unsecured guarantee on the other side.
Asset-Backed Securities have very diversified collateral, they have over-collateralization. Second, they're self-liquidating. They do not rely on a bullet payment that needs to be refinanced at the end. They wind down with full amortization over the life of the securities. They're not covered by bankruptcy protection, they have front-pay amortization that helps de-risk them quickly, and they have very tight documentation with covenants and triggers that provide protection to the underlying lenders. These things also don't just enhance the probability of a default, they also help enhance recoveries in the event of a default. Apollo has built a large asset-backed finance franchise. Over the last 13 years, we've deployed $200 billion into asset-backed finance assets, and we've done this across a wide variety of different sectors.
This team is very closely connected to our FIG team and very closely connected to our overall origination ecosystem. This team has also experienced very low losses over their history. On that $200 billion of deployment, they've experienced only about one basis point of losses. This is really because they're focused on high-grade assets with over-collateralization, and they've done all of this while earning a few hundred basis points of excess spread. What is an origination platform? An origination platform is a standalone company. It has a standalone management team, it has a board of directors, it's independently capitalized. It has a fully match-funded balance sheet, as we'll talk about, and we're focused on businesses that have very long track records of performance. These businesses also have dozens or hundreds of employees that are providing a lot of different services.
It's not only the front-end origination and sourcing, but the underwriting, the servicing, the operations. All of these things are critical to these portfolios and to their performance. We're also focused on doing this in a very granular way. No individual origination is driving our year. We're doing this for thousands of very small transactions, and we're trying to do this in a repeatable way. What do these platforms do? They have a lot of different things that will look very familiar. These are not new asset classes. Mortgages. We have three different mortgage finance businesses. Travel. We have a business that provides aircraft debt, that we bought from GE Capital called PK Air Finance. Fleet leasing. You'll hear from Shlomo shortly about our Wheels business. Franchise finance.
MidCap acquired a business from PNC Bank a couple of years ago, and this is providing loans to quick service restaurants. Home improvement. Our Aqua business provides home improvement loans. We have a business that provides green energy finance to corporations, and this business is called Petros. And then inventory. We have a business called Eliant. Eliant is our trade finance business. It's primarily providing inventory solutions to very large technology companies. These are companies that were faced with chip shortages during COVID and other supply chain shocks, that are looking to hold more inventory on their balance sheet, and these are investment-grade companies. The word "platform" is one of the most overused words in our industry. Everybody claims to have a platform, everybody claims to have differentiated origination. We do not think that traditional fund investments are origination platforms.
That's because they're held in transitory funds, the primary driver of returns is the exit, and incentives drive behavior. Short-term decisions outweigh long-term decisions. These funds also only make equity investments, typically. They can't drive value from investing across the capital structure, they can't drive deployment. Our platforms are owned in permanent capital vehicles. We have taken all of the pressure off of the exit. We are focused on doing things that generate long-term returns and enhance our net income, because the return KPI that we are focused on is net income, return on equity, free cash flow yield. We're also investing across the capital structure in both the debt and the equity. This helps us in two ways. First, it gives us an edge when we're making these acquisitions or running these businesses, because we have more access to capital.
Second, it drives value across our system because we're able to create incremental deployment. Not all volume is created equal. We're looking for businesses that generate both low risk and excess spread. We've looked at businesses in the past that don't meet this. We were recently looking at a business that had about $10 billion of origination volume. The underlying assets were high-quality assets, but they were mispriced, and so we passed on this opportunity. We also see lots of opportunities where there are businesses that generate really high-yielding assets, but they're not low-risk assets. We're looking for things that have both. Atlas and PK, as examples on this page, both have many public comps. Atlas is our warehouse business. You'll hear from Jay shortly on.
Atlas is providing warehouses at lower LTVs than the underlying assets in the term markets, which means they have more collateral and more downside protection. They also have higher spreads, and we'll talk about how we're doing this. The PK business is the same. This is our aircraft debt business. This is providing loans against planes at lower LTVs than an aviation ABS would attach to in its investment-grade tranches. So we have more collateral, and we have lower risk, and we're earning excess spread. That same 200 basis points of excess spread that we always talk about. We've been working on this for a while. This has been a 10-year project. Our first acquisition was MidCap, which you'll hear from Howard on shortly. And we've done 16 of these platform acquisitions over the last decade.
If we started with the Atlas transaction, our most recent one, we would not have been able to do it. That was an incredibly complicated transaction and required the decade of learning and all the things we'll talk about in our ecosystem shortly to be able to accomplish that. Our platforms now, we have 16 of them. We've invested $8 billion of capital. We have $130 billion of assets in these, and most importantly, there are 30 different products in these platforms. These products are important for a couple of reasons. First, they give us more breadth and more diversity, and second, they're creating a positive feedback loop and a flywheel benefit. This is allowing us to drive cross-sell and create incremental opportunities, not just in the platforms, but in the broader Apollo system. This is how our platforms are organized.
We think about them across a couple of different industries. I'm not going to walk through all of these. You'll hear shortly from, from Howard, Shlomo, and Jay about MidCap, Wheels, and Atlas. A couple of others to just highlight quickly on this page. Redding Ridge is another one of our commercial finance businesses. Inside of this business, we also have a large ratings and structuring team. This helps us continue to provide an edge across our other platforms to drive value. And at the bottom of the page, you'll see we have two de novo strategies listed, Cadma and Athora. These two businesses are new, and we're trying to build them organically, but we've not done that with new teams.
We've hired teams that have decades of experience, with very long track records of low losses that have come out of banks and come out of other finance companies. There's no shortcut to excess spread. It requires an edge, and it requires a lot of focus. The edge for us comes from our broad and deep employee base. These 4,000 employees are waking up every day looking to source, underwrite, originate, service, and operate these portfolios and these assets. Our platforms typically have hundreds or thousands of line items. We often think about the rule of 10x-20x for an origination platform. Or what that means is that only about 5%-10% of the volume that we look at and review gets funded and gets originated.
That means for every 1,000 line items we have on our balance sheet, we've had to look at tens of thousands of line items before finding the ones that we're going to originate and fund. This is really why we need a large origination and servicing team across this portfolio. We often compare this to a traditional credit fund that would have a couple of dozen people and a Bloomberg. This is our ecosystem slide, and this is really what we've built over the last decade and really what sets us apart. We talk a lot about culture at Apollo, and the most important part of that for us is the One Apollo culture. We have spent 10 years honing this process. The first platform acquisition involved about 20 people at Apollo, and then after we finished, we realized all of the things that we had missed.
So we do a postmortem after every single acquisition, and we've continued to hone this process even after the last one. The FIG team, or the team that I, that I'm a part of, is really just the M&A team. And we think we're pretty good at M&A, but there are lots of people that are good at M&A. It is not something that differentiates us. What differentiates us is the rest of this page. We have a credit team that has research on 3,000 different companies. We have quant teams. We have asset experts. We have one of the largest ratings teams that would rival any investment bank. Our technology and operations team has people that have 30 years of experience and have worked on hundreds of different transactions and integrations. We have regulatory, insurance, government solutions teams. We have tax, legal, hedging, accounting.
These are all critical to how these get structured, how they get treated, how value gets created, and how value gets protected. We're starting to originate significant amounts of excess origination volume, and these transactions are large. We've needed to include our marketing team to help with third-party co-investments and our distribution team to help with syndication. This whole ecosystem is really what made the Atlas transaction possible. This was a very complicated carve-out from a large, old European bank. It had hundreds of people, it had dozens of systems, it had a significant operations footprint. They were sending millions of wire transactions a year. This business was large. It had $40 billion of assets. It had, it had a couple of 100 facilities in it, warehouse facilities, and inside those warehouse facilities, there were millions of line items.
We had to go through and we had to underwrite all of these. We also had to raise tens of billions of dollars to consummate a transaction of this scale. All of this required a couple hundred people, and we got this all done in a matter of a couple of weeks, which was important to our counterparty to be able to succeed in this transaction. This would not have been possible without the One Apollo culture or without the 15 trial runs that we had in advance of this. How do we think about risk? We think about it a lot. We are not paid to sleep well at night. We are paid to be maniacal about risks.
The two main risks that we focus on for financial services businesses are liquidity risk, which we often refer to as the heart attack risk, and credit risk, which we often refer to as the cancer risk. This page has been... The left side of this page has been the cause of the demise for many great financial institutions over the last couple of decades. Why do people use short-term liabilities? For one reason, they are a lot cheaper. And if you can have very low-cost liabilities, you can earn a higher spread income if the market is working. And what's happened over the last couple of decades is we've seen that there have been multiple tail events and multiple times where the market is not working. The GFC, COVID for certain businesses, and the regional bank crisis earlier this year.
The most recent three names that have faced the left side of this page, and a blowup that's caused because of it, were Silicon Valley Bank, First Republic, and Signature. We have always been focused on the right side of this page. We have long-duration liabilities, we match fund all of our assets, we have long-duration debt. This is more expensive, and we do this because this is safer, and this is the right way to run a long-term business, where we're not just focused on a quick pop or an exit. We're focused on stable generation of income for decades to come. And because this is more expensive, we can underwrite this into our model, so we're only counting excess spread when we describe it to you as spread that is excess of full liability costs that are fully matched to our underlying assets. Credit.
A lot of people talk about track records. We've seen a lot of different track records. We typically see short track records, five years, 10 years. These are track records that have not been tested. We look for track records that have been tested through the cycle, 15, 20, or even much longer than that, as you'll hear from Shlomo shortly. These businesses, over these very long track records, have shown very stable performance. You'll notice on here we say Eliant has a 20-year track record. Eliant was only founded 18 months ago, but Eliant is a joint venture with BNP Paribas, and BNP has been operating this business for about 20 years with no losses. Why are our losses so low? They're so low for all the things that we underwrite in these businesses.
We have a focus on high-grade assets, we're focused on diversified collateral, we're focused on over-collateralization, we're controlling the documentation, we're negotiating directly with the counterparties, we're not entering into standard documentation, it's all customized, we're doing full due diligence, and we have relationships with all these borrowers. This is our risk playbook. We have standardized this across all of our platforms. Every one of our platforms goes through this checklist, and you'll notice some things that are familiar for what we've been talking about. Match funding. Everything starts with a match-funded balance sheet. We have all of our companies go through what we refer to as a wind down analysis. So what they do is they assume that none of their liabilities ever renew, and they all have to be repaid at maturity. We ensure that these companies can sustain a full liquidation.
None of these companies are actually gonna go through this case, but this is the case that ensures that we're fully insulated from blowup risk in all of our businesses. Second, diversification of funding. This is critical, and we don't want all the funding to be concentrated in any from any individual source, not even from Apollo or Athene. So all of our companies have significant access to third-party capital and third-party funding. We have a lot of safety nets to watch over all of this, and none of these businesses are consolidated into Apollo. But as our role as the manager, we have risk officers inside of each of these platforms, we have a risk officer at Apollo on our FIG team that oversees all 16 platforms, and then we have other risk functions at Apollo and Athene. So how do we think about growth?
We've shared this slide in the past at our Investor Day a couple of years ago. We're currently run-rate at about $100 billion of annual origination volumes. About half of these volumes are coming from our origination platforms. The other half are coming from our broader ecosystem.... On a go-forward basis, we continue to expect $150 billion or more of origination volumes over the next couple of years, and we continue to expect about half of this to come from our origination platforms, and the other half to come from our broader ecosystem. Our platforms are all at various stages in their growth cycle. We have startup businesses, we have new businesses. These businesses are focused on organic growth and continuing to expand what they're doing. We have medium-sized businesses. These are $2 billion-$10 billion in size.
These are focused on both organic and inorganic growth, and we've recently done acquisitions at both Wheels and at PK. Then we have very large transactions, large platforms. Two of these platforms were startups, MidCap and Reading Ridge, and these have grown to $20 billion and $50 billion. This is a snapshot of some of the history of how our platforms have grown over time. Howard and Shlomo will talk a bit about MidCap and Wheels. Both of these have grown significantly, both through acquisitions and organically. We expect there to continue to be future growth in these businesses as well. Eliant. Eliant was a startup. This is our trade finance business. It has now grown to a $2 billion platform, and this is a multi-trillion-dollar industry. So we expect significant growth on a go-forward basis for our Eliant platform.
You'll notice on this page we have one arrow that points down, and that is for Atlas. The Atlas business was a much larger business a couple of years ago. But if you recall, a couple of years ago, this business was inside of Credit Suisse. There were a lot of changes going on in Credit Suisse that were very idiosyncratic to the parent company, that are what caused this business to shrink. They had nothing to do with the market opportunity or the future, and we think this business should be at least at its historical size, if not significantly larger, and Jay will talk shortly about a lot of the opportunities that we're seeing there. Reading Ridge was also a startup. It started from nothing, and now it has over $20 billion of assets.
When we think about the white space, we think about this as a lot of assets that will look familiar. These are not new assets. We are not trying to invent new asset classes. These assets have been around for decades. We're focused on high-grade assets, and we're focused on assets that have historical performance. We do not expect to grow from 16 to 32 platforms. We expect that we'll more likely to add on to existing platforms through either organic growth, new product development, or through acquisitions where we can drive synergies on the funding side and on the operating side. And because of the scale that we've already achieved, we're able to be very selective on a go-forward basis as we think about future acquisitions. As we've scaled, we have brought third parties in to co-invest in these acquisitions and these businesses and the deployment alongside of us.
Why do people invest with us? They invest with us for three reasons. The first is alignment. A typical GP would invest 2% or 3% alongside of its investors into an asset. We are investing 25, 50, and in some cases, 75%. This very large co-investment and alignment pledge is giving our co-investors a lot of confidence in investing alongside of us. Second, our track record. We've been doing this for a very long time because we've been doing this for our own balance sheet. Our 13-year track record for our asset-backed finance franchise and our decade-long track record for our origination franchise. And lastly, risk-reward. The assets that we're originating are unique. A lot of people are focused on mezzanine investments, equity investments, junior investments. We're focused on investment-grade and high-grade assets, and that's very different than what we're seeing in the broader market.
How do we think about banks? Banks, we think about as, as a very interesting partnership opportunity. Banks have amazing business models, they have incredible breadth and reach, and they have very large client bases. And these client bases are looking for more and more things. They're looking for more duration. They're looking for more diversity of capital. We have been partnering with a lot of different banks. We talked a little bit about the Eliant partnership with BNP, the Atlas partnership with UBS. Our Aqua business has a partnership with another large U.S. bank. We have multiple other conversations that are ongoing around bank partnerships. Why do banks partner with us? They partner with us at Apollo for a couple of reasons.
First, because of the scale that we've achieved, we're a very relevant partner because we bring a very large balance sheet, you know, to help support these partnerships. And second, because of the types of assets we're focused on, we're much more aligned with the banking system as we're focused on these high-grade assets. I mentioned the flywheel a couple of minutes ago. We're seeing a significant cross-sell and flywheel benefit across our origination ecosystem. We talked a little bit at our last Investor Day, two years ago, about Hertz. Hertz was a transaction where our credit team had done a number of transactions with Hertz, and they helped us identify and execute on the acquisition of Donlen. This has led to multiple other acquisitions in the fleet space, which has brought together the Wheels platform that you'll hear from Shlomo on shortly. Second, Atlas.
Right as we were closing the Atlas transaction earlier this year, the Atlas team helped us identify and execute a very large private credit transaction with PacWest Bank. We're also seeing other areas of cross-sell. Our equipment finance business, Capteris, has partnered with MidCap and Wheels, and is driving a lot of cross-sell benefit as we think about growth there. Our PK Air Finance and Merx businesses, our aviation platforms, helped underwrite and execute on a large private credit transaction for Air France. As Apollo has grown materially, we are still small in the overall market. Most of our AUM is in credit, and most of our AUM is investment grade. It's important to re-highlight that all of our assets are match funded. None of our platforms are cross-collateralized. They all operate independently with their own capital structures.
These are not consolidated into Apollo or Athene's financial statements, and there is no support that is explicit across these platforms. Most of the funding for these assets is disparate and independent from us. It has been a fruitful 10 years. We have been focused on really building out our ecosystem on origination. We think what we've built is highly differentiated and very difficult to replicate. We are seeing cross-sell benefits and flywheel benefits across the system. We're seeing very unique assets with our high-grade focus and our investment-grade focus. We're generating excess origination volumes, and we're able to now share this with our co-investors and with our distribution partners. We think we're poised for growth in the private credit space. So next, we have a couple of our platform executives.
I'm very proud of the teams that we have pulled together and that we've built here, and I look forward to you all hearing from them about what they're doing. So with that, I'd like to introduce Howard to talk about MidCap.
Thanks, Chris. I'm Howard Widra. I am the head of direct origination for Apollo, and more relevantly today, I'm a co-founder of MidCap Financial. So I'm gonna give you a deep dive into MidCap on behalf of the 300 employees that work for us. Simply put, MidCap is a plain vanilla, diversified commercial finance company, which makes senior secured loans to the broad middle market. We're one of the largest in the country, and we're certainly one of the most diverse by product. To just give you a little sense of our history, when we were founded in 2008 by a team of people who are still together today, and when we joined Apollo, the Apollo family in 2013, when Athene bought us.
At that point, we had $2.6 billion of commitments under management. Since that time, we've done meaningful, meaningful portfolio acquisitions. We've added a managed asset business, and we've grown a lot organically on balance sheet. Fast-forward to today, we have close to $50 billion of commitments under management. Just to talk a little bit about what our competitive advantages are. First, we are scaled and full service. We do everything in-house, from sourcing to underwriting to portfolio management, servicing, et cetera. We have a long-tenured management team who has been together and been through cycles, and we have access to diversified funding, and long-dated funding. As Chris said, everything match funded, and I'll go into that in a little bit more detail. To talk a little bit about the assets in our business.
As I said, we have about $48 billion of commitments under management. If you break that down, that's $18 billion of commitments on balance sheet, about $15 billion with third parties, and about $14 billion with MidCap and Apollo affiliates. So to give you an example of how that works, we do a $200 million asset-based loan. We may hold $75 million of that on MidCap's balance sheet. Maybe $50 million of that will go to a third party who the borrower has a relationship with and wants us to bring into the transaction, and the remaining $75 million will go to, either sidecars with MidCap or other Apollo vehicles based on their credit appetite. On the right side, you'll see the funded assets on balance sheet.
It's about half leveraged loans, a little bit more than half, and half other products. This is again consistent with the theme that Chris said, that private credit is a lot more than leveraged lending. When you look at most asset manager private credit vehicles, they really mean leveraged lending, but our business is truly diverse, which allows us to drive a lot more stability in our performance and a lot more opportunity for growth. Talk about our credit history a little bit. We have low losses throughout the cycle. This is our loss history of 28 basis points against all our origination since 2008. There are a bunch of reasons for this. Again, everything we do is senior in the capital structure.
We have large underwriting teams specialized to each of our products, again, all in-house. And then lastly is our portfolio strategy. We are focused on stability for our business, and that starts with how we build our portfolio. So we make sure we're diverse by industry, by geography, by obligor, et cetera. And the best example of that is of our $13 billion of loans on balance sheet, we have about 600 loans, so we make sure that we're as granular as possible. Again, our management team has been together for a long time. All these people, with one exception, were at MidCap at the outset, and actually all of them were also on our previous iterations of our businesses, so been together for a long time.
On the right side of this chart, you can see the comprehensive team. Each of the, these, parts of the business are built out to scale. This is our funnel, and again, as Chris said, this sort of shows you the, the 20-to-one origination to closing, that is important to this business. So since inception, we've looked at about 30,000 transactions and closed about 2,000. I just wanna focus, for a second on the, the top of the funnel, 'cause I think it shows two things. One is, we have a lot of proprietary origination. This is not just people taking calls from the sell side, for large corporate loans.
This is 51 people dedicated specifically to origination, as well as a senior management team that originates as well, and those people are allowed to be dedicated only to origination, 'cause they're supported by 250 people who can execute on the business. And secondly, this large funnel is actually the key building block of our good credit performance. It's our view that good credit performance comes from very, very broad origination, or else you end up being adversely selected. So the idea that we have this much origination from this many different products ensures that we're able to be selective while actually being able to grow well. Just to give you a little sense of our growth graphically, as I said, a decade ago, we were $2.6 billion of assets.
We're at $48.4 billion of as of commitments under management today, and we think there's a lot of opportunity to continue to grow, so we expect this to continue to be up and to the right over the next decade. This is the league tables for the third quarter for middle market leverage lending. First on the league table, sort of any quarter you would pick, we would be pretty high up, and I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a competitor who wouldn't list as one of the sort of the meaningful players in our market. To dig in a little deeper to our balance sheet, to get a sense how we're funded, the $13 billion of assets on our balance sheet, we have first are funded with warehouse financing commitments.
Those are commitments from banks that lend to us, either individual banks that lend us against a given pool of assets or large credit facilities. For example, our asset-based business has a $2 billion line led by Wells with 20 banks in it. CLO financing. We are a regular issuer of securitizations, CLOs for our leverage loans and term securitizations for our other assets. We have $1.7 billion of high-yield bonds or loans outstanding, and $2.9 billion of equity capital. So that, that is how our whole business is funded, and as I'll talk about later, that gives, also gives opportunity for people to invest in our platform, not just in the equity, but across our whole business. Just to give you a sense, again, I've been focused on stability, so this is our spread over time.
It has been stable, as you can see, for the last 10 years, and this is regardless of the change in our product mix, our growth, the competitive environment, where base rates have been, the size of our portfolio. It's really important because, in order to generate stable returns, I've talked a lot about credit, but it starts at the top line. And our diversity of products and our proprietary origination reach allows us to sort of continue to produce stable returns even as we've grown substantially.
So to dig into this a little bit more on the P&L side, if you look at where we are today, about $1.5 billion of interest and fee income off our loan book, that's $650 million net after interest costs, added about $150 million of fees, mostly off of our asset management business. Subtract out losses and operating expenses, we've generated about a 70% ROE this year, so really steady returns for our shareholders. But what I think is most important about this, these numbers is that if you take the $95 million of losses, which is more on an annualized basis than we have experienced over our history, and you multiply it by three, so three times, cycle worse losses, we would still have a double-digit ROE.
This, again, is a really important point that our equity investors understand and our capital providers understand, which we can produce stable returns because of our granularity and diversity, regardless of where the cycle takes us. To talk about our downside a little bit, qualitatively, first, it's our direct lending strategy. 100% senior secured, as I said, we are the administrative agent or a lead lender in almost every loan we do, so we control documentation, and we also control how a loan is managed. We have these diverse lending products, which again, gives us a lot, a lot of ability to build our portfolio the way we want, but there are also many of them are heavily collateralized, so even in defaults, we liquidate at very high levels.
And then we have the scale proprietary deal flow, so I continue to come back to that 'cause we think that is really important for downside protection. But in addition to the loan book, we have the franchise and the value in the franchise. And so that value comes from a lot of things I talked about, the full soup to nuts capability to do everything, the diverse portfolio, the durable financing. But there's also the Apollo strategic relationship, which I have not talked about much, so I'll dig in for a second there. I think there's a couple lots of advantages, but a couple of key advantages. One, access to capital. Obviously, being affiliated with Apollo gives us the benefit of that reputation and reach in the marketplace, which is really important to us.
Secondly, I think more importantly, are all the product synergies. When we call on, for example, private equity sponsors, and we are delivering loans for their buyouts, the fact that we are part of Apollo and we can deliver secondaries through S3, and NAV Lending, and GP Capital, and Hybrid Value for more structured transactions for them, is a really key differentiator for the people we're competing with, and so enables us to be more important to those people and more likely for them to want to use us. By the same token, you know, Apollo, the fact that Apollo has a direct lending arm that is really important in the market, you know, allows them to be more relevant to those counterparties when they're looking for capital.
You know, Chris was talking about the flywheel overall with all the originations. This is our sort of own mini flywheel with Apollo, well integrated and really beneficial. Just to talk a little bit about the benefit to our investors. Athene and Athora have $1 billion of equity invested into our business. As you saw this year, 17% ROE , good, good steady returns as an equity investment. But they have $6 billion of capital invested into MidCap and MidCap assets. So that other $5 billion is mostly liabilities from our balance sheet, either being a participant in our warehouse facilities or buying the portions of our securitizations that appeal to them or holding our high-yield bonds.
And so from the Athene and Athora perspective, not only do they get an equity investment that has generated stable returns and good dividends for them, they also can effectively, opportunistically pick off the liabilities that work best for them, and have access to them on a proprietary basis, in other words, get filled for as much as they want. By the same token, our other investors, because we are sixty percent owned by LPs, also get benefits beyond the equity investment. There are very few people who groups that are invested in our equity that don't also have SMAs with us, so they get access to private credit that they like, that fits their strategy, but, you know, beyond our investment.
So for them, they get a good return, and they can take advantage of our excess origination. This slide really just shows you the opportunity for growth. We are meaningful players in all these markets, but we're still small relative to the size of the markets, and they're all growing. And so we feel like not only is there an opportunity to continue to grow as the markets grow, but to also increase the slice of our pie because of our competitive advantages. So as I said, over the next decade, we expect to continue to be able to take advantage of where the market is for us. So just key takeaways for the business. We are a large, stable, diversified generator of yield. That's first and foremost. Many aspects of our business are really difficult to replicate.
We have diverse proprietary origination. The sheer number of years of management experience, unfortunately for our age, is hard to replicate. And we have a durable liability structure with over 250 counterparties that provide us capital. Last, we bring a lot of benefits to our owners. Of course, our equity returns have been good, but the access to other assets. In the case of Apollo, that's building and strengthening the relationships throughout the middle market, and for Apollo and all our investors, it's extra return beyond their equity investment. So, that's it. With that, I'll hand it to Shlomo.