Macquarie's pivot to private
The millionaire factory is no stranger to changing tack in search of higher returns. This time around, that means shifting a lot of money into private markets.
Macquarie Group has never shied away from reinventing itself. The business began as an offshoot of a City of London investment bank, built a unique Australian version fuelled on a generous profit sharing model to attract the best talent, and then morphed into an asset manager with annuity businesses complementing commodities, capital markets and banking.
Now, with two major divestments this year, it is shifting more of its money into private markets. In February, it sold its US debt capital markets (DCM) business; today, all of its European and American public markets asset management capability.
In both cases, it has done so with typical Macquarie cold calculation to direct capital into areas where higher returns are on offer. And that’s no longer public markets.
As CEO Shemara Wikramanayake said after the DCM sale, “our [private market] team feels they have the capacity to identify much greater volume of investment … so we're keen to support them with more capital”.
