POWER PLAYERS: Meet 14 Carlyle execs leading the firm's $53 billion lending division that's been on a tear recently

• The Carlyle Group's lending division has been a major focus of the firm's CEO Kewsong Lee.
• The credit team has nearly doubled its assets under management over the past four years.
• These are 14 people leading Carlyle's $53 billion lending division.

One of Kewsong Lee's biggest priorities as CEO of The Carlyle Group has been to build out a lending division that offers new financial products for investors and serves as a true equal to its longstanding private-equity team, which has bought thousands of companies over its 34 years of existence, from luxury fashion brand Golden Goose to digital content company Getty Images.

Carlyle's credit team has been around since 1999, but only over the past four years have its investing professionals begun to assemble as a single, global unit, organized across industry verticals and embedded in the firm's broader organization. Its assets under management, meanwhile, have expanded from $29 billion to $53 billion under the same time frame.

Read more: Meet Kewsong Lee, the private-equity exec who's now running the show solo at Carlyle. 20 insiders lay out why the move signals a big transformation at the $221 billion firm. This has taken place under the watch of a new leader tapped in 2016 by Lee, who at the time was Carlyle's co-CEO. Lee had observed the expansion of private credit within PE firms following the rollout of the Dodd-Frank Act, expansive regulation put in place in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis that included curtailing the amount of lending that can be done by large banks.

To take advantage, Lee tapped into one of Carlyle's large clients, the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, where Mark Jenkins led the firm's global private investment group. Lee hired Jenkins in September of 2016 and the veteran investor switched sides - from limited partner to general partner - and set out to assemble his team.

"The approach Kew and I agreed on was to put strength on strength with what we were already doing on the private equity side," Jenkins told Insider in a recent interview.

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Read the full story here: Carlyle's credit crew: Meet the 14 people leading the PE giant's $53 billion lending division that has been red-hot during the pandemic