Mumbai, Sept. 7 -- India's private-credit market is seeing growing demand for something it does not yet have at scale: a true secondary market. Investors are increasingly looking beyond fresh fund commitments to seasoned credit assets, where repayment history, borrower performance and expected cash flows are already visible, but most transactions in India today are refinancings or early sell-downs, rather than the investor-to-investor portfolio trades typical of mature credit-secondary markets, industry participants told Mint. That could change as more private-credit managers build multiple fund vintages and earlier funds approach maturity, creating a larger pool of established assets for investors to buy. The appeal is greater visibility into risk. Investors can assess how a borrower has performed since the original investment, whether leverage has fallen and whether the business has survived a period of volatility. "We are seeing a lot of opportunities for takeouts," said Aakash Desai, Chief Investment Officer and Head of Private Credit, 360 ONE Asset. "Today, compared to two years ago, the amount of refinancing has increased. That's a function of more confidence in the market and more capital flows, and an increased amount of diligence on underlying credits." Desai said global investors are also enquiring about established Indian credit exposures. "Global buyers are more evolved-they want to buy mature, seasoned assets.A lot of global investors are reaching out enquiring about assets that stood the test of time." Others such as Axis and ICICI Prudential have also moved into successive funds while their earlier vintages mature, giving investors greater visibility into underlying assets and realised returns. The global market illustrates the potential. Earlier this year, Ares Management raised $7.1 billion for its debut Ares Credit Secondaries Fund, one of the largest dedicated institutional credit-secondary funds globally. Coller Capital's dedicated credit-secondary fund had exposure to about 1,660 portfolio companies across 34 managers as of March 2026. In 2024, BlackRock reportedly prepared a $1.3 billion private credit continuation fund. India, however, remains at an earlier stage. In developed markets, private-credit secondaries typically involve an existing investor selling its exposure to another investor, often to meet liquidity needs, rebalance a portfolio or exit as a fund approaches maturity. That is not yet the norm in India, said Vishal Bansal, partner at EY. Much of what is described as secondary activity instead involves an investor selling down shortly after the original transaction or a borrower refinancing existing debt "In India, the sell down generally happens either immediately at the time of transaction closure or within a short span of the investment, say three to six months," Bansal said. Unlike developed markets, there are generally no "super profits" being made by investors through such early sell-downs, he added. In August, Mint reported that Shapoorji Pallonji (SP) Group's record $2.7 billion bond issue is finding a new class of investors as private wealth managers are parcelling out pieces of the unrated, unlisted debt issue, selling investors a future payoff tied to Tata Sons' potential initial public offering (IPO)....