Private Credit Case Study Interview: How to Spend the Ninety Minutes

"You have ninety minutes and an information memorandum. How do you spend them?" is the private credit case study reduced to one line, and it is where most candidates lose the process. Not on the technicals they rehearsed, but on the clock they never planned for.

The case study is not a modeling test. An interviewer already assumes you can calculate leverage and build a downside case, because you have practiced both. What the case actually measures is sequencing: whether you can reach a defensible view under a deadline, structure it the way a lender's screening memo does, and stop building once another minute stops changing the answer.

What the Case Study Actually Tests

A candidate who spends eighty minutes on a model and ten on the recommendation has the analysis backwards. The credit committee that eventually reads a real screening memo skips straight to the recommendation page. If it does not hold up on its own, the model behind it does not matter.

The case study is built to expose exactly that habit. It hands you more information than ninety minutes can fully process, on purpose, so that partial, well-prioritized analysis beats complete, unprioritized analysis. The candidates who score well are not the ones who read every page of the memo. They are the ones who decide, in the first few minutes, which two or three numbers will actually move the decision, and spend the rest of the clock on those.

The exercise is graded on the decision it produces, not on the size of the model behind it.

The Ninety-Minute Budget

A time budget that survives contact with a real clock, built from how the ninety minutes actually get spent when the recommendation comes out coherent:

Private Credit Case Study, Time Allocation (minutes, 90-minute case)

Phase	Minutes
The business and the ask	10
The numbers: cash conversion, leverage, coverage, downside case	40
Risks and structure	20
Writing the recommendation	20
Total	90

Source: Illustrative. Private Credit Prep case-study framework.

Ten minutes on the business and the ask: what does the company do, what is being financed, and what is the interviewer actually asking you to decide. Forty minutes on the numbers, historical cash conversion, leverage and coverage, then a downside case built from the business's own drivers rather than a flat haircut. Building that downside case is its own skill, and it is worth having the framework memorized before the clock starts, so the forty minutes goes into the numbers rather than into remembering the method.

Twenty minutes on risk and structure: name the two or three risks specific to this business, not generic macro risk, and the terms, leverage level, covenant package, security, that address each one. The last twenty minutes go to writing the recommendation, starting with the decision, not building toward it. Candidates who protect this last block over the modeling time are the ones whose answer sounds finished at minute ninety.

Protect the last twenty minutes before you protect the model.

What the Interviewer Hands You

Most memos open with a capital structure table similar to this one, for a fictitious sponsor-backed industrial coatings manufacturer, Meridian Coatings, used here to show how to read it under time pressure rather than to calculate leverage from scratch:

Meridian Coatings — Capital Structure at Close ($ in mm)

Facility	Face Value	Interest Rate	Maturity	xEBITDA
$40mm Revolver (drawn)	$10.0	S + 4.75%	Mar-29
Unitranche Term Loan	202.5	S + 5.50%	Mar-31
Total Debt	$212.5			4.7x
Less: Cash and Equivalents	(12.5)
Net Debt	$200.0			4.4x
Memo — LTM EBITDA $45.0 / Undrawn Revolver $30.0 / Total Liquidity $42.5 / Sponsor Equity $178.0

Source: Illustrative. Computed on the Meridian Coatings worked example; not drawn from any real transaction.

The memo usually gives you the xEBITDA column already, as it does here. Reading it takes fifteen seconds: 4.7x total debt, 4.4x net of cash. The mistake is recomputing that arithmetic by hand to double-check it. Trust the memo's numbers and spend the saved minutes on what the memo does not give you: how those multiples behave in a downside, and what happens to coverage if EBITDA falls. Federal Reserve staff measure mean interest coverage of around 2.0x for private credit borrowers generally [1], which is the level most cases are built to test around, comfortable in a base case and thin the moment EBITDA slips. The Financial Stability Board notes that private credit borrowers are often rated around single B- and typically carry higher leverage than the broadly syndicated loan market [2], which is exactly why the case wants to see coverage checked, not just the multiple quoted.

A cap structure table is a starting point to stress, not a number to re-derive.

The Failure Mode: Building Instead of Deciding

Most candidates in 2026 still open the model before they open their mouth, so the interviewer hears a number before they hear a view. That habit is backwards for a lender's job, and it is the fastest way to fail a ninety-minute case even with a clean model at the end of it.

The tell is a candidate who cannot state a provisional yes, no, or yes-on-conditions in the first five minutes. Without an early view, there is nothing to test against as the numbers come in, and no way to notice, at minute sixty, that the downside case has already changed the answer. State the view early, treat it as provisional, and let the analysis confirm or overturn it rather than build toward it from nothing.

A view stated at minute five is easier to defend than one built at minute eighty.

What the Written Recommendation Must Contain

The output is a memo, not a model. A recommendation that reads as complete has four parts:

• The decision, in the first sentence: yes, no, or yes on stated conditions.
• The two or three risks that could change the answer, ranked, not listed.
• The terms you would require, each tied to the risk it addresses.
• One line naming what you did not get to, and how it could move the answer.

That last line matters more than it looks. It signals that the gaps in the analysis are known, not hidden, which is exactly what a real credit committee expects from a screening memo. The free credit investment memo framework follows this same structure, section by section, and is worth practicing against before the clock is real.

The recommendation is judged on its first sentence before it is judged on its last page.

If You Run Out of Time

Running out of time is common, and it is not itself a failure. What fails a case is spending the last five minutes finishing a spreadsheet instead of writing the recommendation. If the clock runs out with the model unfinished, stop the model. Lead with the decision you have, state it as provisional if it has to be, name specifically what you did not reach, coverage in the downside case, or the terms, and say how it would change your answer if the number came in worse than assumed.

An interviewer who sees a candidate protect the recommendation over the model has seen the instinct the job actually requires: under a real deadline, on a live deal, the decision still has to go out even when the analysis is not finished. The single most common live version of this question is the same test compressed into forty-five seconds instead of ninety minutes.

An unfinished model with a clear recommendation beats a finished model with none.

The private credit interview guide covers how the case sits inside the wider process, alongside the technicals and the credit view. Practice the four-part memo structure above against a timer, on a business you have not seen before, and the ninety minutes stop being the problem.

Sources and Method

Figures marked illustrative are computed on the Meridian Coatings worked example and are not drawn from any real transaction. All market figures are reported as of the date shown in the source and were last verified on 2026-07-29.

[1] Fang Cai and Sharjil Haque, "Private Credit: Characteristics and Risks", FEDS Notes, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, 23 February 2024. https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/private-credit-characteristics-and-risks-20240223.html [2] Financial Stability Board, "Report on Vulnerabilities in Private Credit", 6 May 2026. https://www.fsb.org/uploads/P060526.pdf