Sascha Steffen is the DWS Senior Chair in Finance and Professor of Finance at Frankfurt School of Finance & Management, and Director of the Centre for European Transformation (CfET), a research platform on financing Europe’s economic transformation, including the role of private credit and nonbank finance.

His research examines the structure and dynamics of private credit and nonbank lending — how these markets fund themselves, redistribute risk, and interact with banks under stress — and what this means for financial stability and regulation. Recent work covers the funding structure of direct lenders and BDCs, payment-in-kind (PIK) lending, and the cyclicality of private credit. He has published in the Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, and Review of Financial Studies.

Sascha serves on the Advisory Scientific Committee of the European Systemic Risk Board (ESRB) and is a Research Fellow of CEPR and SAFE. Before his academic career, he worked in risk management at Deutsche Bank in Frankfurt and New York.