YouSaid · the spoken record

Frank Danieli

lines on the record: 66
first: 2026-07-16
most recent: 2026-07-16
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“It's easier to catch flies with honey rather than vinegar. If you come from a restructuring background, you're always thinking about leverage, pressure points, taking a hard line. It's this idea of balancing not just smarts and IQ, but with EQ, thinking about relationships, the things that incentivize people, what motivates people in a broader basis than disciplines, the very influential for me. It's using more of the carrots rather than the sticks and knowing when to do that in the right circumstances. I wish I knew that earlier.”
2026-07-16 · Capital Allocators · Roadmap for Private Credit from Australia – Frank Danieli of MA Financial Group (EP.511) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My biggest investment pet pee is when people focus only on the investments themselves. They forget that that's just one third the job. Most of the alpha in the business of investing, I believe comes from portfolio management and from risk management. These things are equal thirds. The real alpha is not coming from the investment side, it's coming from the portfolio management, the risk management.”
2026-07-16 · Capital Allocators · Roadmap for Private Credit from Australia – Frank Danieli of MA Financial Group (EP.511) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the coattails of what's happened before, those two people have been hugely influential in my professional career. What's your”
2026-07-16 · Capital Allocators · Roadmap for Private Credit from Australia – Frank Danieli of MA Financial Group (EP.511) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To you that gave you these good life lessons. One of the best pieces of advice he ever gave me was you're only as good as your last game. I played a lot of sport growing up. It doesn't matter what you've done before. It's the next game is the one that matters. He used to use this anecdote of Australian rugby league player called Graham Langlands. Imagine it's a Derek Jeta or someone like that. This Graham Langlands back in 1975, it was in the grand final of his team. Incredible play, one of the greatest evers, well, they call it immortal in that Australian sport. He showed up at this game. He was wearing white boots under a sponsorship deal with Atidas. This is a time when everyone wears colorful boots today. They were black boots only, and he had an absolute shocker. They got thrashed. His legacy was almost tarnished by this one thing, or in that grand final, he was a show pony that didn't work. You've got to bring that degree of focus to every day and to everything you do. You can't run.”
2026-07-16 · Capital Allocators · Roadmap for Private Credit from Australia – Frank Danieli of MA Financial Group (EP.511) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the restructuring business, there was someone retired and they wrote a book called Everything I Know in Life I Learned From Doing Restructuring. They sent it to a bunch of people. It's almost a bit of legend around the industry now. You can't buy this book on Amazon, but I've got a copy of it. It has basically funny anecdotes. One of them, page 41, I knows, if you want to be a Jedi Master, find your Yoda. It's all about the power of mentorship, people backing you, collaborating with you, bringing you through the ranks. I've had that from Chris Weich, who's one of the co-founders of MA Financial Group. Today, our joint CEO. We've worked together since I was a baby banker. He's back to me and he's got behind me as we've wanted to do things like build a credit business from a small idea into something that's quite large and scalable. The other one for me has been my dad. My dad had all these great anecdotes and sayings when I was growing up, he'd say things.”
2026-07-16 · Capital Allocators · Roadmap for Private Credit from Australia – Frank Danieli of MA Financial Group (EP.511) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My first real paid job when I was in school was as a piano teacher. I worked with this guy in Australia, a place called Cole's Music House, and he had this interesting model where he'd teach people from kids to seniors based on pop songs, songs that were out there right now to make it fun. And he used intuitive methods. What I learned from it was the power of process simply communicating complicated ideas. That's been helpful for me ultimately going into the world of finance because we love in this industry jargon and complexity, but it's about bringing it back to first principles. And I learned that on the job.”
2026-07-16 · Capital Allocators · Roadmap for Private Credit from Australia – Frank Danieli of MA Financial Group (EP.511) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thing going on. Take away all the noise. That's the fundamental challenge of the industry. It's what's under the hood, how do we enhance disclosure, transparency, communication of what we do in a way that people understand.”
2026-07-16 · Capital Allocators · Roadmap for Private Credit from Australia – Frank Danieli of MA Financial Group (EP.511) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's the nature of the credit, the exposure to a particular type of sectors or something more balanced, or whether it's things that are in the news around, say, liquidity and gaining. This is a long-term investment asset class. This is not liquid credit. The way people should be thinking about private credit is think about my portfolio. Let's use 60-40. The part that 60 is for growth. Then there's the part that's 40, the defensive historically in bonds. How much of that 40 do actually not need daily liquidity or very frequent liquidity? How much of it can I invest in a longer-term structure where I've got a contingent amount of liquidity? I can take some of my money, or sometimes all my money, out periodically, but I know I'm invested for the term of the underlying loans. For some people, that'll be 5%. For some people, that might be 20%. Whatever it is, it's about making sure that you understand that characteristic. And that's the key.”
2026-07-16 · Capital Allocators · Roadmap for Private Credit from Australia – Frank Danieli of MA Financial Group (EP.511) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's noise in the US and in other parts of the market, including Australia. What it all to me boils down to are these principles of disclosure, transparency, and being clear, not just about what's in your portfolio, but also transparency around the risk adjusted return of your book, where are returns coming from? Are they coming from performance of loans as you thought per contract? Are they coming from high interest rates, lots of delinquency getting you to a net position? Is there leverage embedded in there? Is there structure complexity? What does it look like? What is the risk profile of the loans? Then there's this third layer of governance, transparency. How you set up, how do you have the right checks and balances and controls as necessary in credit? They're the sort of elements that are important when they're understood, investors have confidence and they know what they're getting.”
2026-07-16 · Capital Allocators · Roadmap for Private Credit from Australia – Frank Danieli of MA Financial Group (EP.511) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Private debt. We want to contribute to the redefinition of what it means to be in private credit. And that's a lofty ambition.”
2026-07-16 · Capital Allocators · Roadmap for Private Credit from Australia – Frank Danieli of MA Financial Group (EP.511) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People to participate in owning the business, that's continued as an ethos as a public company while we're listed we're still a third owned by staff. That idea of alignment runs deep for us. You've got to balance the two. How's the most relationship evolved from the early days to building the asset manager to now also participating in the US? MOLIS is invested in MA, the company. That relationship is very strong on the advisory side of the business where I used to be. Now that I'm in the investment business, on the asset management side, it's different. We operate separately. And I think about as cousins in the market, but in the asset management side, it's separate. As you start to build your presence here and elsewhere in the world, what are you hoping to achieve at MA over the next bunch of years? We want to be one of the preeminent managers, particularly in this fixed income alternative.”
2026-07-16 · Capital Allocators · Roadmap for Private Credit from Australia – Frank Danieli of MA Financial Group (EP.511) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Diversified group also means we're in lots of lines of business, and that means that we can be sensible about leaning in when it makes sense and pulling back when it doesn't. What's it like being a public company in Australia? It's good to be a public company and it's hard to be a public company at the same time. The advantage is you have currency, capital, being a public company gives you a degree of accountability to the public market to a range of investors that are not just you as an individual or a series of partners. And that is a good thing. The hard thing about being a public company is sometimes that accountability can be too short-term focus versus long-term focus. And so you're always having balance. What I've liked about MA and the ethos that the founders embedded within the business was this idea that they wanted people to be owners too, owners of a business, not just renters. When we were a private company, that was allowed.”
2026-07-16 · Capital Allocators · Roadmap for Private Credit from Australia – Frank Danieli of MA Financial Group (EP.511) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Emerging space, and we think there's just going to be tens of trillions of dollars of capital that move into that area. We're investing early and we're bringing this way of thinking to the market, hopefully leveraging some IP, structuring technology that is a little bit different to what's here in the market. What are the strengths and weaknesses of having an advisory business alongside an asset manager? That phenomenon for us operates in Australia. You have to be careful around conflict when you have a diversified business. So of course you have to think about that lens. There's a huge amount of advantage in having an advisory business one. It gives you a very interesting set of IP access to the market, creates a degree of halo at the right level, there's the ability to have the right feedback loops around what doesn't make sense. The fact that we have a diverse”
2026-07-16 · Capital Allocators · Roadmap for Private Credit from Australia – Frank Danieli of MA Financial Group (EP.511) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Around providing real world finance is where we see the most opportunity and we see it because of the arbitrage that we believe exists for structural reasons. How do you think about your right to win the right loans in the US, a much more competitive market relative to your positioning compared to Australia where you're clearly one of the big players in the market? In this area of asset-based finance, we can do that. We're not trying to do direct sponsor-backed lending here in the US. What we've done is to apply an asset-based finance way of thinking to get some exposure to that sector. We've publicly announced some strategic partnerships in that space that enable us to do that so we can be applying an asset base fence facility to get diversified exposure into the sector in a private way. But where we still get to curate what's actually in the book, that works well for us. The rest of the asset-based finance market we see as an”
2026-07-16 · Capital Allocators · Roadmap for Private Credit from Australia – Frank Danieli of MA Financial Group (EP.511) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Low cost of capital, you have to step up the risk curve. It's not that it's bad loans, but it's just not our business. We're not in that opportunistic credit business. We're seeing globally that those same thematics around banks changing the way that they approach real world lending, not just sponsor finance, is gaining pace. We were fortunate when we were expanding our US presence that happened to coincide with the time when there was the regional banking crisis. My CEO, Chris Wyken, we were on a plane over to the US literally that weekend of Silicon Valley Bank. That has also shifted the dynamic where you're seeing this whole tale of regional banks here in the US looking for different ways to approach the markets as they deal with managing the rest of their balance sheets and the regulatory impost that's coming. You're seeing the overlay of the Basel 3.4 regimes coming through in all parts of the world. This opportunity”
2026-07-16 · Capital Allocators · Roadmap for Private Credit from Australia – Frank Danieli of MA Financial Group (EP.511) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Incentivized. Is there some regulatory overlay to this that we need to be thinking about? Those non-financial or quantitative things that we've embedded in the process that have made it better. If you turn from thinking about risks to the opportunity set, how do you look at the opportunity set in Australia, in the rest of Asia, and the rest of the world? I'll start with Australia versus the rest of Asia. The opportunity we like exists because there are these areas where it's more sensible for banks to not do things directly or to partner up. We love that model where we can be arbitraging these things where banks used to do them, but it's not efficient and we can be a solution provider in that area where we can capture some premium. In other parts of Asia, that dynamic doesn't exist. We're often looking the ambit of what banks can do in that market is wide. And whenever you're trying to compete with someone with such a”
2026-07-16 · Capital Allocators · Roadmap for Private Credit from Australia – Frank Danieli of MA Financial Group (EP.511) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that sensitivity has moved a long way. That's a good exercise, but it doesn't change that much unless there's been fundamental changes in the underlying borrower. The other thing that does change often and that comes up are these discrete risks that could be behaviors of competitors, industry dynamics changes in technology. We look at a range of these other discrete non-macroeconomic risks, fraud and intercredited dynamics if you see certain banks decide they're going to exit a market. We look at all those different things as well. We've also made it a lot more practical where there are loads that seem to have risks being elevated. How do we crack open the debt documents? Is the security structures robust as we thought? What's the social issues around this dynamic? Are we in a club or a syndicate where we have to deal with others or are we bilateral? How are the management team going to respond? Are they appropriately in?”
2026-07-16 · Capital Allocators · Roadmap for Private Credit from Australia – Frank Danieli of MA Financial Group (EP.511) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do they exist now? No? They're not in place. We take off. If they do, they stop, they check, they try to rectify those things. If they can't get comfort on some serious things, they just don't go anywhere. That's why air travel is so safe. We're trying to take that same philosophy. We're trying to make it a process and it's the process that makes you optimistic. When you bring those credits into the book and then you're running your analysis on things going wrong, what have you learned about running that effectively to improve the portfolio? One of the things that we've done is that we've had to make the war games process more than just the macro stress testing. The macro stress testing, we thought about it a lot at the time of deal inception. How far can things fall in the world or the bad things happen before our capital is going to face an issue? Has the underlying business collateral or asset changed?”
2026-07-16 · Capital Allocators · Roadmap for Private Credit from Australia – Frank Danieli of MA Financial Group (EP.511) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Those processes when they can be enhanced. We have in our IC papers a bunch of checklists. The checklists are all about saying, what are the things we've seen that have correlated with things that have gone wrong before? Some of them are amber flags, some of them are red flags, some of them are bright lines. If the borrower could steal the assets away, bright line is just not for us. There's some things that are, okay, this is a risk. We have to be cognizant of it, but we can live with that. We think about an airline pilot, they're about to take off. They sit there and they go through a bunch of checklists that say, what are all the things that have caused”
2026-07-16 · Capital Allocators · Roadmap for Private Credit from Australia – Frank Danieli of MA Financial Group (EP.511) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of our founders, Andrew Pritham, likes to say, in our credit business, we have to be optimistically pessimistic. You can't do nothing. We want to be able to provide capital into the real world. The optimism comes from having followed a rigorous process. That gives you the conviction that my portfolio is constructed well and I spend all my time thinking about where risky is, what the downsides could be, I can be positive. I can be optimistic about how this capital will perform through different market conditions. We try to avoid having people in a team and developing people that you want to be the star loan picker. In my view, that's for equities. We get compound returns and you can have the 10 bagger upside. That's not our business. The people that thrive for us are the people that are good at process, that want to improve.”
2026-07-16 · Capital Allocators · Roadmap for Private Credit from Australia – Frank Danieli of MA Financial Group (EP.511) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we get what we think we're exposed to. When you've gone and restructured a debt for sleep and you've pulled these things apart, you get appreciation for here and indenture and a facility agreement now market. Why are things there? What's that clause for? There's a whole bunch of clauses people never think about. They, oh, I've got this covenant. I'm senior secured and it is this basket. Okay. But what are all the other terms? What do they say? We want to know that stuff and make sure that we in our portfolio have a range of different things that can't all go one way. How do you?”
2026-07-16 · Capital Allocators · Roadmap for Private Credit from Australia – Frank Danieli of MA Financial Group (EP.511) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of the core things is making sure that the correlations between different sectors are understood in the portfolio management sense. We want to know what drives each of those different sectors of lending and be able to map the differences in them. Some of them are more basic. Do you have the right level of diversification, not just I've got low position sizes, but I have carefully thought about what my target ranges of different sectors, asset-backed commercial, asset-backed consumer asset, backed real estate, corporate, non-sponsor, sponsor are within the book, how you're managing those up and down through a cycle. It's a balance of art and science. The important thing is that framework around we need to understand risk. We need to be able to evaluate what drives credit performance that we're building the right structural protection.”
2026-07-16 · Capital Allocators · Roadmap for Private Credit from Australia – Frank Danieli of MA Financial Group (EP.511) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where interest rates will go, what could happen, what could come out of left field, that we're not thinking about today. We have to think about the spectrum, a distribution of risk. Build as much protection mechanisms as we can, types of security, asset backing, defensive features, things that give us the really long runway before a problem hits us when something goes wrong. And that's, again, we're in the credit business. We're not in the equity business. We're not compounding returns, and we're not trying to do equity returns through debt. We're trying to deliver fixed income with a premium for trading off a bit of liquidity.”
2026-07-16 · Capital Allocators · Roadmap for Private Credit from Australia – Frank Danieli of MA Financial Group (EP.511) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of them I really like is the only certainty is uncertainty. You always hear this idea that Trump did this, something happened in the UK. There's a lot more uncertainty now. I always laugh. Last week, before you knew that there was going to be war in the Middle East, you might have felt comfortable, but that was an illusion because there was huge uncertainty you just didn't know it. I've always believed that the future is a constant level of uncertain. What you're grappling with is always investing under uncertainty. How do you do that? How do you avoid, especially in credit, taking these high conviction views on one thing where you expose your investors, your LPs, to catastrophic risk of loss because you believed you knew you could predict the future? The other one sounds like a buffetism. It's predicting rain doesn't count. Building the arc does. It goes to this same idea of we can't crystal ball what's going to happen tomorrow. Got no idea.”
2026-07-16 · Capital Allocators · Roadmap for Private Credit from Australia – Frank Danieli of MA Financial Group (EP.511) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Changes happen regularly around deal structures and terms. It might be 25 to 30 percent of the time, pretty regularly, that that's causing changes to the structure. It's rarer that it's totally eliminating the deals. We're doing 5 to 10% of the deals we see through the funnel, but it's the broader process that's eliminating things mainly rather than the red team. The structural tightening happens a lot. What it also does is that it creates a lot of cross-pollination of IP that we're making sure things we've seen before, terms we used in other facilities are being applied. It's a good cross-check to give comfort to what we're doing.”
2026-07-16 · Capital Allocators · Roadmap for Private Credit from Australia – Frank Danieli of MA Financial Group (EP.511) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You've done that with your team over the years, they've sat on both sides of different credits and gotten sharper and better. How often does a credit that you're looking at at that investment committee level change today because of inputs from the red team?”
2026-07-16 · Capital Allocators · Roadmap for Private Credit from Australia – Frank Danieli of MA Financial Group (EP.511) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of the loan. Finally, maybe we need to do some checks or embed some controls for the third risking credit, which is fraud risk. We was thinking about credit risk, which you need to manage structure risk, which you need to control, and fraud risk, which you need to avoid totally. We've seen a couple of egregious examples of double pledging recently. Are we making sure we've got consistent custodians or trustees across all the facilities of a counterparty? Are we doing the right audit, AUPs, cash checks, and so on? Have we required that of the borrower in our facility so we can go and do those when we need to? It could be things like that, which don't eliminate deals, but make them safer or more sustainable through different market conditions.”
2026-07-16 · Capital Allocators · Roadmap for Private Credit from Australia – Frank Danieli of MA Financial Group (EP.511) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In getting at their side of the answers, then they were the ones on the original deal team promoting the deal. The same's quite collegiate. You get to enjoy that process and learn from it. What it elicits is not so much, wow, we should never have even looked at this deal. It's a failure of process. If we've gone and done three months of work on a private deal, then we don't do the deal. When that happens, we're saying, hang on, what went wrong along the way? What's normally coming out of the red team is we've got a good view on the credit risk side. We might need to tighten the structure. If it's in asset-backed, maybe there's an eligibility criteria allowing a certain kind of lending that we shouldn't include, or we'll need to adjust a covenant or portfolio parameter to limit exposure to that. Maybe we need to tighten the baskets in the corporate deal in a direct asset deal. We need more equity in from the borrower. We need some change in the structure.”
2026-07-16 · Capital Allocators · Roadmap for Private Credit from Australia – Frank Danieli of MA Financial Group (EP.511) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Normally, when that happens, people aren't thinking straight, they're frozen. We want people to say, I've thought about this, hasn't gone the way it should. Here's the break the glass now plan to go fix things. It's things like that that have been core to our credit framework more than just saying we'll only lend at four and a half turns of leverage or never more than five and a half X. We don't have those hard heuristics. We do have this framework for risk thinking and this philosophy that risk is everyone's responsibility because we're aligned. We're all investors and we have that philosophy of co-investment, not just at the senior team, but through the entire team. On that red team, blue team exercise, it always sounds like great idea. We'll just take contrarians and throw them in the room. What have you seen work in the weeds that allows people on the red team to have as much drive?”
2026-07-16 · Capital Allocators · Roadmap for Private Credit from Australia – Frank Danieli of MA Financial Group (EP.511) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Elicit where the risks are so that we can then monitor for those things in the real world once we've made the investment because we're in the private markets we can't exit our positions as easily. You want to make sure you've understood that downside framework up front. The other thing that it does is that it sharpens your thinking about origination when that person who was the red team yesterday is now doing their own deal flow. So you get a symbiosis out of this. We've done a whole bunch of other things in the process. We do these things called war games now every quarter where we simulate recessionary scenarios, moderate, severe in a crisis scenario on all our loans in our book. It's a huge piece of work. It's not that we can predict all those economic indicators, how they'll actually affect every loan in the real world. It's getting people to think sometimes the world becomes a bad place. Sometimes things don't go your way. Another lesson of the restructuring business”
2026-07-16 · Capital Allocators · Roadmap for Private Credit from Australia – Frank Danieli of MA Financial Group (EP.511) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That we don't have directly, and it wouldn't make sense yet for us to own. You mentioned credit frameworks to use. What are some of those frameworks? I mentioned this What You Have to Believe framework earlier. The other thing that we like to do in our process is every time we're taking a deal to an investment committee, we assign some people to be our red team. This is basically taking someone from the investment portfolio team, importantly not working on the deal. They haven't met the management, worked all weekend, stayed up all night, haven't fallen in love with the deal. They're going to look at this deal before the investment committee. They're going to go through all the raw information, the data, all the credit docs. They've got to come to IC. and articulate the contrarian perspective. Why would you not do this deal? What's been missed? Is there something we're not properly calibrating? Are we thinking at scenario X is more remote than it actually could be? Sometimes this might feel belligerent. It's not intended to be. We want a thorough...”
2026-07-16 · Capital Allocators · Roadmap for Private Credit from Australia – Frank Danieli of MA Financial Group (EP.511) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That platform, they became part of our business and fully integrated into the global team we run. How do you think about those trade-offs of having a partnership where there's deal flow to acquiring the team? Its horses for courses, there are times where it makes sense to be in a partnership model if it's smaller scale or if there's something unique that that partner can bring particular access that it wouldn't make sense for us to develop. You usually want that to be complementary. Ideally, we can bring more than capital. We might be able to bring certain types of our data analytics, some of our credit frameworks, some of the terms and structurings that we put into our deal flow that might be different from what is standard in that particular sector or market. And we can do something together. That's how we've thought about it. We want the partner to bring something we don't have usually access to a certain part of the market.”
2026-07-16 · Capital Allocators · Roadmap for Private Credit from Australia – Frank Danieli of MA Financial Group (EP.511) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And portfolio management professionals with 100 people around them doing various functions. Then we have an asset management platform of 250 people and the people in those separate platforms. So it's quite a large operation. When you develop this with this expertise in the region, what was the decision process to expand globally beyond the APAC region? The history of Australian platforms going global isn't that good. We thought that because of the inverse development of private credit in Australia, where it started in these other areas outside of just sponsor-backed lending, that we could take some of those learnings and some of that expertise and apply it in a global sense. We did it by finding the right people. It was through the Mollison Company connection. Through that connection, we were introduced to a group here. We worked with them in a partnership model originally, providing co-investment capital in some of the origination here.”
2026-07-16 · Capital Allocators · Roadmap for Private Credit from Australia – Frank Danieli of MA Financial Group (EP.511) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Access, then you do it through contract as well. Some of those strategic partnerships we've done. We've done one with Major Ozzy Bank going back in 2021. We've done some with a bank and asset managers over here in the US. We've done some things in Europe. We're constantly looking for ways to do this where partnership is the right model. When you add that up today, how many people and platforms do you have across SAB lending, direct lending, and corporate lending? Across the total MA financial group, all the employees and all the businesses and things we run, there's probably 900 people. We're author Australia, Asia. We have presence now here in the United States. We have two offices here in the US. We're doing asset-based finance here. We have a lot of different access points. There's about 30 different platforms that we're working with regularly, some of them within our group, some of them third-party platforms. The direct people in the private credit investment business is a team of about 40 investors.”
2026-07-16 · Capital Allocators · Roadmap for Private Credit from Australia – Frank Danieli of MA Financial Group (EP.511) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're quieted out of a small Australian bank. We thought it was a misunderstood asset. We thought that the broker channel that people would get their loans through intermediaries, whether they're home loans, car loans, business loans, whatever they are in Australia would grow and grow. That's certainly been the case. Today, 75 to 80% of loans in Australia don't go by someone going to a lender directly. They go through an intermediary or broker those brokers use infrastructure like our platform to access the loans. We liked the business for its infrastructure characteristics. It's important for data and intelligence around what's happening right now lifetime in the market. You're seeing eight or ten billion alons go through it every month. You can see what's happening. Also creates a real halo effect for us in origination, especially around asset-based finance, because we are more as a group than just a provider of capital. We're a true partner. We're a source of origination for counterparties. We're a source of...”
2026-07-16 · Capital Allocators · Roadmap for Private Credit from Australia – Frank Danieli of MA Financial Group (EP.511) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not that dissimilar to what a bank looks like, you're just doing it with a slightly different capital base and capital structure. I'd love to hear more about the acquisitions that you've done to build that origination platform. One of the early acquisitions we made in that space was small non-bank mortgage lender in Australia. There's been times where we've built organically our specialty finance platform is one we found the opportunity, we secured it, we used firm capital to lock up the first of the lending opportunities and then we went and got the right credit licenses to do the direct financing facilities, the tech, the origination process, the credit documents. It is helpful when you go to that granular level and you see what the production of credit looks like, some of the trade-offs that are made. We've done both. On top of that, we made an acquisition of a business which became the financial infrastructure business we have today, the Finshore platform.”
2026-07-16 · Capital Allocators · Roadmap for Private Credit from Australia – Frank Danieli of MA Financial Group (EP.511) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is a challenge. That's why you have to invest heavily in proprietary origination channels, this ecosystem that can produce loan opportunities so that you're not forced to just participate in auctions. It's not to say we won't do something more syndicated or clubbed because we do. But you want to have that tension and that flexibility that you can keep producing assets. We've spent hundreds of millions of dollars of our own money building out that ecosystem. On top of that, we've invested heavily $240 million of Furman staff capital in the funds to show alignment skin in the game in what we're doing. If you think about those two things, that's a lot of capital. It's capital that's got to come from your own balance sheet or from your firm. That's one of the challenges in it. What you'll see is that if you roll for 10 years, 20 years, this industry of private credit will be all about...”
2026-07-16 · Capital Allocators · Roadmap for Private Credit from Australia – Frank Danieli of MA Financial Group (EP.511) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That idea of if you're a little smaller, you may have a more fine tuned selection on a credit, but you're in a market that's competing, you still have the same body of opportunities to look at than others.”
2026-07-16 · Capital Allocators · Roadmap for Private Credit from Australia – Frank Danieli of MA Financial Group (EP.511) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of lending your documents become Swiss cheese, you have to still find ways to rationalize it. They then say, well, hang on a minute, I've got Swiss cheese, I'm not getting paid that well, I better only lend to quality companies. That's how you've ended up with concentration to a whole bunch of software companies because they actually did sound like really high quality companies. Maybe they are. Their mission critical system of record, recurring revenue, high margin, high cash generation, businesses with high valuation. So I should have a good margin of safety. And then, oh no, Claude is arrived and it could disrupt this entire business. The fundamental problem isn't lending to software. The fundamental problem isn't doing sponsor-backed loans. The fundamental problem is that in the business of lending, you need a big diversified balance sheet, not only scale or diversification in the sense of lots of things, you need lots of different things.”
2026-07-16 · Capital Allocators · Roadmap for Private Credit from Australia – Frank Danieli of MA Financial Group (EP.511) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You don't want is the moral hazard which you're seeing in some parts of the global private credit market at the moment, especially with the exposure to sponsor-backed direct lending for software companies, where people saying, well, hang on a minute, I lend in this particular area, that's my job. So I'm going to find ways to rationalize that the next leveraged loan of this type is good. How do I do that? First I'll start giving up on price. I can shave some pricing away. Once it gets to a point where there's not a lot of alpha left, you can't keep giving up price. So you have to look for something else to give. That's when you give up terms. And that's how you end up with 85% covenant blending in some of these markets. But once you've given up all your covenants, then what do you do if there's still competition and you can't do anything else? You can either call up to your clients and say, take the money back, which usually money managers aren't in the business of, or you keep doing that activity, then you give up sacred rights.”
2026-07-16 · Capital Allocators · Roadmap for Private Credit from Australia – Frank Danieli of MA Financial Group (EP.511) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The main difference from a lot of our peers is that we have exposure to asset-based finance, direct asset lending, and direct corporate lending, sponsored and non-sponsor-backed in one place. We have 38 different subsectors of lending that we're exposed to. The reason is because we're trying to create that fixed income alternative style product where we're saying choose your risk tolerance, we'll deliver product that will deliver that same profile as far as we can, but with a premium for the fact that there's some complexity, there's less liquidity, and there's a proprietary element of what we do. The difference is that we're not monoline. As a result, we've got this broad-based book and we're wading up and down all the different sectors we're exposed to. That idea comes from the workouts history. It's about saying at some point in the cycle, the marginal loan in a particular space isn't going to make sense.”
2026-07-16 · Capital Allocators · Roadmap for Private Credit from Australia – Frank Danieli of MA Financial Group (EP.511) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Impact our exposure to, say, home loan portfolios in our flagship book today, about 14% exposure to many different types of loan lending. They're driven by interest rates and unemployment. And you've got the security of the asset if things go wrong. We have other exposures like our specialty finance books, legal disbursement funding, insurance premium funding that have almost no correlation to interest rates and unemployment. They're driven by totally different things. The idea is through a cycle, yes, there'll always be some ups and downs, but if you have enough different sectors, you've balanced your exposure to those sectors well, you can deliver a consistency of both income and capital.”
2026-07-16 · Capital Allocators · Roadmap for Private Credit from Australia – Frank Danieli of MA Financial Group (EP.511) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We've developed ways to think about units of risk, how risky is a particular position that we have exposure to based on some qualitative factors that we've been able to observe historically, but also some judgment factors that we've seen out there in the world. They don't just relate to credit risk, loan-to-value ratio against the enterprise or an asset. They relate to structural features of the loans, how wide or loose the covenants and baskets are how extensive they are. Some of the qualitative factors about the management of the counterparties and so on. Trying to break these things down into what's my actual risk? Not in volatility terms, but in probability of facing a problem, then determining what are the correlating factors, what things cause that probability for each of these different segments, how do we create a book where the correlations are low, something that's going to”
2026-07-16 · Capital Allocators · Roadmap for Private Credit from Australia – Frank Danieli of MA Financial Group (EP.511) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We've built a lot of data infrastructure to do this too. We want to be able to run loan books at large scale. Flagship funds that we run might have 246 positions. For the positions that are the asset-based finance, which I think is today 98 different facilities, there's 1.4 million underlying loans and receivables that represent the collateral of those loans. Excel's out the window. You need to be able to use data infrastructure to visualize these loan books to stress them up and down and to focus on what is important to know how this crate will perform through different cycles.”
2026-07-16 · Capital Allocators · Roadmap for Private Credit from Australia – Frank Danieli of MA Financial Group (EP.511) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We like the process to be fluid. We're having regular dialogue. You want everyone to be around and to be able to share those views. We've got regular forums where people can talk about the opportunities that they're seeing. We can have that dialogue and debate. Then we can leverage the fact that we've created this lending ecosystem out there to go and produce or access those loans into the market to get the access. What we don't want to do is to be waiting for an auction to occur. say, hey, now you can participate or not. We'd rather be able to go out and create the opportunity on a bespoke basis. That's how we're creating the opportunities in the first place through a one to three month process. We're then doing a series of processes throughout that, which is leveraging the network we have at MA as far as we can, cross-pollinating IP across the whole group, all the different businesses we run, the relationships at the”
2026-07-16 · Capital Allocators · Roadmap for Private Credit from Australia – Frank Danieli of MA Financial Group (EP.511) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The investment team that's doing the selection of the credits. How do they go about deciding when to dive in on something relative to that portfolio team that may say, well, that's great credit, but we already have a lot of exposure there?”
2026-07-16 · Capital Allocators · Roadmap for Private Credit from Australia – Frank Danieli of MA Financial Group (EP.511) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of it comes from having worked in the distress, the restructuring business and applying it to performing credit. And the investment team.”
2026-07-16 · Capital Allocators · Roadmap for Private Credit from Australia – Frank Danieli of MA Financial Group (EP.511) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Position came up, but the investment team, having looked at the intricacies of it, they objected and they said, hang on a minute. There's insurers putting the squeeze on, costs are going up, you've got Rensling to inflation, inflation was going through the roof, and the structure was pretty loose, and so I objected. And that became quite a distressed structure. You want this natural tension. And the job of myself, the others on our investment committee is not only to provide the governance environment for these groups, but also help to manage that tension for the benefit of our capital. We've designed our credit philosophy around an approach we call what you have to believe. That's all about saying every time we do a loan, we want to know where it breaks. Every loan, we want to know where you do lose money, even if it looks like a remote set of circumstances, because that will mean we can go monitor for those things in the real world we've thoroughly stress tested it. We've tried to build these things into the nature of our process.”
2026-07-16 · Capital Allocators · Roadmap for Private Credit from Australia – Frank Danieli of MA Financial Group (EP.511) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In what it did. Structure was tied. This was just a fine lot. Portfolio management team objected. Why would they object? Well, the reason they say is we actually already had a couple of childcare positions. They thought that it was enough exposure. The idea was, well, hang on, because it's a good loan. Do we need another one? Now that goes the other way sometimes. You'll see the PM team saying, well, from a strategic perspective, we need exposure to X, Y, Z in the book to keep it balanced. That's something to have. And the investment team on the ground, looking at the intricacies of the credit, might say, well, that's good from a macro or top-down perspective, but the nuances of these deals don't stack up. We had a real example of that a couple of years ago as we were doing more corporately lending, because we like the dynamics that were emerging in that space. If we're going to be increasing our exposure to corporate, it makes sense to have exposure to defensive industries, which is true, such as healthcare, also defensive, aging population in Asia and so on.”
2026-07-16 · Capital Allocators · Roadmap for Private Credit from Australia – Frank Danieli of MA Financial Group (EP.511) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bank and you're out, and then the bad bank guy comes out, and he's dealing with the workout. Never in that value chain do you think about your job as being a fiduciary of the deposit holders? I hear a lot in so many firms this idea of I'm an originator there. I've got to get deals done. How do we get this deal done rather than should we do this deal? Then you have this other cohort called the portfolio management team. They're the fiduciaries of capital. Their job is credit strategy, portfolio construction, thinking about the correlations between different parts of the portfolio and what they should look like, things like treasury liquidity as well. You've got these two cohorts that collaborate, but they also have a natural tension between them. That tension could be, I'll give you a real example, investment person's found a really good loan. It was a senior secured corporate loan to a child care business. It was low leverage. It was in regional parts of Australia. It was market leading position.”
2026-07-16 · Capital Allocators · Roadmap for Private Credit from Australia – Frank Danieli of MA Financial Group (EP.511) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source