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

  1. “Let me split into two basic cohorts. Then there's a whole series of support functions around them. The two main cohorts in the asset management business are our investment team and our portfolio management team. The investment team by their nature, they're there to source investments, underwrite loans and positions. They're not originators. We banned that word. We don't want them to just originate, throw it over the fence and it's someone else's problem now. We want them to own those positions for the life of them. That's their job. The thing about the incentives that people have, if you grew up in a commercial bank, you think about your client in that bank as the borrower, the CFO or the sponsor, MD or whatever. You do the deal when you bring in the deal in, next thing you do is you're beating up credit to get the deal done. Then you're funded. It's over at Treasury's problem now. Then, oh no, it's gone bad. Well, it gets moved from you to the bad.”

    2026-07-16 · Capital Allocators · Roadmap for Private Credit from Australia – Frank Danieli of MA Financial Group (EP.511) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Customers in the Australian economy. It's a bit like how banks might use credit card data to have a real time pulse on the economy. You can see where the lending standards get better and worse, and we wanted that. Finally, we always believed in partnerships. We've done a range of strategic partnerships with banks and other specialist financial firms and asset managers around accessing deal flows. The idea was have this proprietary source to have a wide funnel, tens of billions of dollars a year of potential lending opportunities, and then have a disciplined process to filter that out. We're trying to avoid losers not pick winners, trying to basically filter out credit that's going to go wrong or at least make it a very small incidence when it occurs. I'd love to dive through those various aspects of how you do it. You mentioned origination, the importance of platforms and relationships. What is your team look like at that level of the investment 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

  3. “Large space. It's not going to be a couple of trillion dollars. It's going to be tens of trillions of dollars. Your problem was not going to be AUM gathering. Your problem was going to be sourcing good quality loans and the ability to produce those loans through cycles. That's why we went down a path of proprietary origination. Everyone says they have proprietary origination and what people often mean by it is I've got some great professionals with lots of relationships in the market and that's part of proprietary origination. We felt it was important to have platforms. That's why we have the non-bank lending business, our own lending businesses that can lend in certain areas of the economy and produce assets that our funds can own. That financial infrastructure business, not only a source of access, but a huge source of data, intelligence, live time access of what's happening in the markets touches 350,000.”

    2026-07-16 · Capital Allocators · Roadmap for Private Credit from Australia – Frank Danieli of MA Financial Group (EP.511) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Sure, that we embedded the learnings of what goes wrong in credit, not just around the credit risk of your loans, but also around the structures that you're investing in, the structure risk, some of the other pitfalls that can happen through lending. So you put yourself in a good position if something inevitably does go wrong. The other thing that we sold through the restructuring business was the importance of empowered process, good team structuring, good portfolio management, not just good credit selection. We spent a lot of time designing the infrastructure around the business as to how we were going to approach the market. The other thing that we thought was important was that if we were right on the thesis that you were going to see a significant amount of capital move off bank balance sheets or in a world where banks were going to partner with institutions to provide capital, was that there's going to be 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

  5. “Capital, it is pension capital. It's looking for a long term investment, it's able to trade off a degree of liquidity for a premium if it can exist. It's also looking for something that's more of a fixed income alternative rather than I want to get equity returns through debt. It's seen a system gravitate to something more investment grade oriented or a blend of investment grade and sub-investment grade compared to what you might see in other parts of the world. The other thing about Australia is that it is part of APAC. It's close to Asia. We've seen a significant amount of capital all through Asia invests in these areas. With these two sides of the need starting GFC on the lending side and this capital that needs to find a home, this type of strategy, how did you think about what you wanted to put together in the asset management business? We came from a restructuring background. What we wanted to do was to make sure”

    2026-07-16 · Capital Allocators · Roadmap for Private Credit from Australia – Frank Danieli of MA Financial Group (EP.511) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “That's about $4 trillion today. It breaks down about 75% into large institutional style funds and about a trillion dollars in self-managed funds, which are for high net worth individuals or high income earning professionals. You've got these two sectors in the local market that are large and growing that have participated.”

    2026-07-16 · Capital Allocators · Roadmap for Private Credit from Australia – Frank Danieli of MA Financial Group (EP.511) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Globally. Globally, this term private credit is almost synonymous with sponsor back direct lending. Our book is 60% asset-backed facilities, 20% direct asset lending, and then 20% in the direct corporate lending, which includes sponsor-back direct lending. It's not saying there's a certain type of leverage loans that were better done in credit funds. It's saying there's a whole bunch of things that banks used to do. They either don't want to do them anymore or can't do them efficiently from a capital perspective and there's a different way. It's a wider definition of the term, and that's what's occurred over the last 10 to 15 years. When that pivot posts GFC Kim from the bank balance sheets, the inception of private credit and the asset management side, what capital came in that supported it? In Australia, there is a pension system called superannuation. You have to compulsorily put a certain amount of your money every month into a pension.”

    2026-07-16 · Capital Allocators · Roadmap for Private Credit from Australia – Frank Danieli of MA Financial Group (EP.511) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “These banks are important in that market. There was an empowered regulator in Australia in the banking space that post financial crisis wanted those banks to be unquestionably strong started to impose a lot of the regulatory and prudential changes that have come out of the GFC much earlier and much more conservatively than what happened globally. At the same time, there was a range of market structural changes, the rise of intermediaries and brokers for loans, technology, and other factors that led those banks to change the way they do a lot of business. They exited a whole series of areas, certain types of home loans, car loans, business loans, equipment and asset finance, changed the way they do those loans. Rather doing them directly, they do them by partnering with institutions like us and providing asset-based finance facilities to specialist companies that then do the end activity. In our region, private credit looks different 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

  9. “Building a performing credit business where the whole goal is to try to limit the chance that we're going to be in one of those situations. The reason for that structure was that the objective was ultimately to build more than just an advisory business, in particular an asset management platform. About 85% of the business today is in various forms of asset management. I leave the credit platform where we're investing across a range of different strategies in that market. We also have created this lending ecosystem, which is a large piece of financial infrastructure platform on which there's about $179 billion or $125 billion of managed loans on platforms. We'd love to hear your thoughts on the region or the lending strategies and private credit. The Australian market historically was a very concentrated banking market. There's the big four banks in Australia. And if you go back, they controlled 80% of lending. If you think about systemically important...”

    2026-07-16 · Capital Allocators · Roadmap for Private Credit from Australia – Frank Danieli of MA Financial Group (EP.511) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Thanks so much for joining me. Ted, good to be here. Why don't you take me through your background that led to your path in the seat? My background was in a combination of funds management and consulting. I come from the dark side of credit. I was a restructuring or workouts banker advising special situations, hedge funds and companies, banks that had got themselves into a capital structure that needed to be fixed. I met the founders of MOLUS Australia. Molus Australia was a 50-50 joint venture between Mollus and Company, the global firm listed on the New York Stock Exchange and the local Australian staff, which is today MA Financial Group listed on the ASX. I was doing that and in particular in the post-financial crisis era, the platform in Australia had about a 50% market share advising on these situations, the recapitalizations occurring from that post-GFC era through today. And I've parlayed that into”

    2026-07-16 · Capital Allocators · Roadmap for Private Credit from Australia – Frank Danieli of MA Financial Group (EP.511) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Learn more about the upcoming journey. Hope to see you on the mountain. And thanks for spreading the word about the hero's journey and capital allocators. Please enjoy my conversation with Frank Danielli.”

    2026-07-16 · Capital Allocators · Roadmap for Private Credit from Australia – Frank Danieli of MA Financial Group (EP.511) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Before we get going, longtime listeners might remember my discussion of the lived experience of Joseph Campbell's hero's journey created by Michael Murbosh and described in episode 402 two years ago. Well, after an eight-year sabbatical, I'll soon return to the mountains of West Virginia for my next journey. I'll take leave of my familiar surroundings and electronic devices to go on a week-long adventure, meeting allies, facing ordeals, and encountering the so-called Belly of the Beast. After which, I'll return transformed by the experience. I have no idea what I'll find or learn once I arrive, and that is the essence and beauty of the experience. There's still time to engage and sign up. Hop on Heroes JourneyFoundation.org 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

  13. “System, an MA Financials Strategy for Building Proprietary Origination across the lending ecosystem. We then turn to MA Financials Investment Process, including the separation of investment selection from portfolio management, red teams, war games, and rigorous stress testing. Along the way, Frank shares why sourcing, not fundraising, will define long-term winners, why private credit requires diversified balance sheets, and why portfolio management and risk management are the largest sources of alpha in the asset class.”

    2026-07-16 · Capital Allocators · Roadmap for Private Credit from Australia – Frank Danieli of MA Financial Group (EP.511) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Guest on today's show is Frank Danielli, Head of Global Credit Solutions at MA Financial Group, and ASX listed alternative asset manager that oversees $15 billion Aussie dollars across a broad range of private credit and lending strategies and $179 billion in a lending ecosystem platform. Frank began his career in restructurings, a self-described dark side of credit, and has used the lessons from special situations and distressed loans to build a performing credit platform across asset-backed finance, direct asset lending, and corporate private credit. Our conversation discusses what global investors can learn from the model of private credit in Australia. We explore the evolution of private credit in Australia and why it developed differently from the sponsor-backed lending market in the US, the regulatory shift that pushed lending off bank balance sheets, the role of Australia's pension”

    2026-07-16 · Capital Allocators · Roadmap for Private Credit from Australia – Frank Danieli of MA Financial Group (EP.511) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “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. I'm Ted Sidees, and this is Capital Allocators.”

    2026-07-16 · Capital Allocators · Roadmap for Private Credit from Australia – Frank Danieli of MA Financial Group (EP.511) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “What 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 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 of lending, you document to become Swiss cheese, you have to still find ways.”

    2026-07-16 · Capital Allocators · Roadmap for Private Credit from Australia – Frank Danieli of MA Financial Group (EP.511) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source