Thirty years ago, alternative investments were the exclusive preserve of the ultra‑wealthy and their institutional managers. Today, they are available to millions of retail investors. But the journey to get there required disrupting some of the most entrenched institutions in global finance.
I have spent my career at that frontier. Here is what I learned.
The incumbents have more to lose than you have to gain
When I started building Macquarie's alternatives distribution platform in 2001, the major banks and wealth managers had no real interest in seeing alternative investments become mainstream. Their margins came from managed funds, wraps and platforms; products that did not need explaining and generated reliable revenue streams.
Alternatives threatened all of that. They required specialist knowledge. They locked up capital. They needed new legal structures, new custody arrangements, new adviser training programs. The incumbents looked at that list and saw costs. I looked at it and saw a moat I could build.
The incumbents looked at that list and saw costs. I looked at it and saw a moat I could build.
The lesson: if you are disrupting an industry where incumbents are rational, they will protect their margins until they cannot. Your window of opportunity lies in that gap between when they could respond and when they do.
Complexity is a distribution problem, not a product problem
Contrary to common belief at the time, product was not the biggest barrier to alternatives adoption. There was ample evidence that the strategies worked. Endowment funds had been generating strong risk-adjusted returns from alternatives for decades. The problem was communication.
An adviser sitting across from a client cannot recommend something they do not deeply understand. And in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the industry had not invested in building that understanding, or arming advisers with the confidence and tools they needed. Product manufacturers continued to build complex structures and wrote long Product Disclosure Documents designed to satisfy Legal, not to empower investors to decide. They left translating the opportunity to others, or more often to nobody.
That is the gap I saw, and the opportunity I pioneered by building a translation layer: education programs, tailored term sheets, and communication frameworks that made complex ideas legible without making them simplistic. Within three years, Macquarie had the largest alternatives distribution footprint of any non-US firm globally.
Distribution is the bottleneck, not the product. If people do not understand what they are buying, they will not buy it. And nor should they.
Regulation is architecture, not an obstacle
Every time I proposed a new alternative product structure, the first response from the compliance team was a list of reasons it could not be done. My response, every single time, was to treat that list of objections as a design brief.
APRA will not allow it in superannuation? Fine. What structure will they allow? The retail managed fund regime is too restrictive? What about a wholesale offer? Can we create an eligible investor certificate pathway?
The advisers who struggled to distribute alternatives gave up at the compliance wall. The ones who grew their businesses found the way through. My job was to find the door, hold it open, and then make it wide enough for thousands of advisers to walk through simultaneously.
The firms that engineer from compliance outward, scale. The ones that treat compliance as an afterthought, do not.
The Global Financial Crisis was the best thing that happened to my career
In 2008, Macquarie had A$7 billion in alternative investments under management. When the crisis hit, some of those funds faced real stress. And the institutional investors we were dealing with, the platforms, the superannuation funds, the family offices, were closely watching everything we were doing. And everything our competitors were not.
The conventional response was to manage communications, minimise visibility, and hope things resolved quietly. We did the opposite. We over-communicated. We put out monthly investor updates. We brought investors into workouts as active participants. We explained every decision.
The result? Not one investor suffered a default. Not one fund attracted a regulatory penalty. And when the market recovered, every one of those investors came back. Because we had earned their trust.
Transparency in a crisis is a competitive advantage that lasts a decade.
Building global platforms requires local humility
By the time I had expanded Macquarie's platform to 14 countries across 5 continents, I had learned that "global" is not a strategy: it is a result. You get there by being genuinely local, market by market.
What worked in Australia did not work in the UK. What worked in Canada did not work in South Africa. The investment products were similar. But the distribution models, the regulatory frameworks, the adviser relationships, and the cultural expectations of how you build trust were all completely different.
The executives who struggled in international roles were the ones who assumed the playbook was portable. The ones who succeeded treated each market as a new opportunity.
Global scale comes from local depth, not global templates.
What I'd tell my younger self
Do not wait for the industry to be ready. It will not be. The advisers who wanted alternatives in 2000 did not have access. The investors who needed diversification in 2008 did not have options. If you wait for demand to be obvious, you have already missed the moment.
Build the thing that should exist. Build it carefully, build it with compliance architecture from day one, build it with the education layer baked in. And then go find the advisers who are already asking the question, because they are always there, waiting for someone to give them an answer.