In recent years, there’s been a noticeable shift in financial services: experienced professionals who honed their expertise at major institutions like ANZ, Commonwealth Bank, and Macquarie Group are increasingly moving to private firms. This migration raises fundamental questions about sophisticated financial methodologies. Can these methods actually function outside the infrastructure that originally developed them?
This analysis explores three dimensions of institutional knowledge – technical analytical capability, strategic organisational leadership, and long-term institutional knowledge. We’re examining what transfers effectively and what may require institutional infrastructure. Understanding these variations matters for private firms seeking to compete with institutional capabilities, professionals considering career transitions, and clients evaluating where to access complex financial structuring.
The Anatomy of Institutional Expertise
Institutional knowledge isn’t just about credentials or general experience. It’s specific methodologies refined through repeated application at scale. Understanding these distinct capability types is essential for evaluating their portability.
Technical analytical capabilities include cash-flow modelling that projects seasonal cycles and matches working-capital facilities to inventory patterns. Covenant design calibrates interest cover ratios, loan-to-value thresholds, and presales commitments. Security structuring involves rental rolls, property portfolios, and revenue streams with staged drawdown mechanisms tied to independent certifier milestones. These methods develop through transaction work at institutions like ANZ and Commonwealth Bank.
Of course, the neat categorisation of institutional knowledge types rarely reflects the messy reality of actual careers, where someone’s expertise usually spans multiple domains in unpredictable combinations.
Strategic organisational capabilities involve consolidating diverse business units into integrated divisions. Resource allocation across portfolios. Restructuring operations for efficiency. This type of restructuring occurs when asset management businesses are consolidated, drawing from institutional experience at firms like Janus Henderson.
Long-term relational capabilities develop differently. They require decades of organisational transformation, creating new profit centres, succession frameworks spanning multi-decade professional collaborations, and pattern recognition across economic cycles.
These capabilities develop through different mechanisms. Technical skills through transaction volume and credit committee cycles. Strategic skills through portfolio management responsibility. Long-term skills through organisational continuity.
Technical Knowledge in Translation
Credit analysis represents one of the most technically demanding disciplines in banking. Accuracy in cash-flow projections, precision in covenant calibration, thorough security assessment – they directly determine transaction viability. The question arises: can these analytical methods work in private settings, or do they require institutional infrastructure to maintain their rigour?
There’s something deliciously ironic about demanding precision in cash-flow forecasting when markets can shift overnight on a tweet. Yet the discipline remains essential.
One approach to addressing this challenge involves applying established analytical methodologies in private settings where transaction scales remain comparable. Martin Iglesias provides an example of this approach. As a Credit Analyst at Highfield Private since January 2025, he brings 21 years of experience from ANZ and Commonwealth Bank, where he specialised in cash-flow modelling, covenant design, and security structuring for mid-market and larger corporates.
A notable transaction during his tenure involved supporting an online retailer’s expansion from a medium-sized enterprise to a $250 million operation. The transaction applied cash-flow analyses tied to inventory and receivables patterns to structure working-capital and term facilities, coordinated through institutional credit approval processes. At Highfield Private, Iglesias applies similar methodologies to originate and assess credit opportunities for private clients, focusing on aligning facility structures with borrower cash generation. Actually, his focus on the same $10–30 million transaction scale that characterised his institutional deals suggests that technical knowledge portability often depends on maintaining comparable deal parameters.
Iglesias’s transition demonstrates that credit analysis rigour can transfer effectively to private settings. However, the technical knowledge portability appears scale-dependent rather than universal.
Strategic Frameworks in New Contexts
Senior institutional roles develop distinctive capabilities beyond transaction execution. Portfolio construction logic. Resource allocation across business units. Organisational design balancing efficiency with regulatory requirements. Strategic positioning for sustainable competitive advantage. The question is whether these strategic frameworks can scale down to private firms.
One solution involves leveraging strategic organisational frameworks that operate at the architectural level. Rob Adams serves as an example of this approach as the group chief executive and managing director of Perpetual Limited since September 2018. Under his leadership, Perpetual underwent significant restructuring by consolidating its asset management businesses into a single global division.
This restructuring illustrates how institutional experience in portfolio management and organisational design translates across contexts. By assessing business unit synergies and consolidating operations for efficiency, Adams applied architectural thinking developed through exposure to complex organisational structures at Janus Henderson. The consolidation from multiple separate asset management units into one integrated global division represents the type of architectural thinking developed through institutional exposure. Sure, the scale’s different, but the fundamental logic of identifying synergies and eliminating redundancies applies whether you’re restructuring a global bank or a mid-sized asset manager.
Adams’s consolidation demonstrates that strategic organisational frameworks developed in major institutions transfer effectively to private firms because they operate at the architectural level. Unlike technical knowledge that depends on comparable deal scale, strategic frameworks address structural questions that exist across firm types.
The Tenure Dimension
Certain financial services capabilities may develop only through extended institutional tenure. Relationship networks built over decades within single organisations. Pattern recognition across multiple economic cycles in consistent contexts. Strategic vision balancing short-term performance with long-term positioning. Succession frameworks that transfer knowledge across leadership generations.
Careers characterised by sustained institutional presence often demonstrate these tenure-dependent capabilities. Nicholas Moore exemplifies this as the Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of Macquarie Group from 2008 until his retirement in November 2018. His career represents sustained institutional presence without transition to private firms.
Moore’s development of Macquarie Capital into a major profit centre required strategic vision and resource allocation authority that multi-decade institutional positioning provides. This involved identifying new business opportunities, allocating capital and talent toward long-term strategic priorities, and integrating new capabilities into established institutional frameworks over years. His 30-year collaboration with Shemara Wikramanayake illustrates how institutional knowledge transfers across leadership generations through sustained continuity. Well, you can’t replicate three decades of shared context and mutual trust in a quarterly planning session.
Moore’s career trajectory illuminates capabilities that may fundamentally require sustained institutional tenure. Developing new profit centres within existing organisations. Maintaining strategic direction through leadership transitions.
These capabilities raise questions about whether private firms can replicate the organisational continuity that enables such long-term transformations.
Patterns of Portability
Examining the three types of institutional knowledge reveals systematic patterns about what transfers under what conditions.
Technical credit expertise transfers most effectively when transaction size remains comparable to institutional experience. The cash-flow modelling, covenant design, and security structuring methods effective for mid-market facilities may not directly translate to significantly smaller or larger transactions without adjustment. This suggests technical knowledge may be scale-specific rather than universally adaptable.
Strategic organisational capabilities operate differently from technical transaction skills. The logic of business unit consolidation applies across scales because it addresses structural questions rather than transactional specifics. This suggests that strategic frameworks are more broadly portable than transaction-specific technical expertise.
Capabilities developed through sustained institutional presence represent a third category. The development of new profit centres within existing organisations requires strategic vision and resource allocation authority that multi-decade institutional positioning provides. Career patterns reveal how sustained continuity fosters unique relational capabilities. Distributed tenure across multiple institutions simply can’t replicate this.
Of course, there’s often a gap between portability theory and the messy practice of actually making institutional methods work in entirely different contexts.
Technical capabilities developed through exposure to institutional processes raise sustainability questions. Can these methodologies be maintained without the infrastructure that originally refined them? Career stage patterns also illuminate different portability questions. Mid-career transitions differ from late-career leadership shifts or complete institutional careers in their knowledge transfer dynamics.
Implications for the Sector
Understanding which institutional capabilities transfer determines competitive dynamics, client access patterns, and sustainable business models in financial services.
Private firms gain advantages by accessing institutional-grade technical capabilities. This enables sophisticated cash-flow analysis and covenant design previously available primarily through major banks. Strategic organisational capability is also accessible. Consolidation efforts show potential efficiency improvements by applying architectural principles from larger institutions.
However, constraints exist. Technical expertise focused on specific transaction ranges suggests limitations in adapting institutional expertise to other scales without methodology modification. Infrastructure gaps raise questions about maintaining analytical rigour without institutional checks such as data systems and regulatory oversight.
There’s a beautiful paradox here: maintaining institutional-grade rigour without any of the actual institutional infrastructure that created and sustained that rigour in the first place.
The migration of technical and strategic capabilities creates a more distributed expertise model in financial services. This potentially improves mid-market client access by offering complex credit structuring through private firms with more flexible engagement models than major banks provide. However, persistent institutional advantages remain in domains requiring large-scale infrastructure or sustained tenure.
These transitions represent relatively recent developments, meaning their long-term effectiveness remains to be proven.
The Future of Financial Expertise
The great institutional exodus has created a natural experiment in knowledge portability. We’re discovering that sophisticated financial methodologies don’t require their original institutional homes to function – but they’re surprisingly picky about their new environments.
Technical expertise travels well within familiar parameters. Strategic thinking adapts more broadly. Long-term institutional capabilities, however, seem to need the very thing that private firms can’t easily replicate: time and organisational continuity. It’s as if some forms of knowledge are inherently institutional, not because of complexity but because of context.
For private firms, success depends on matching the capabilities they attempt to those that are actually portable. For professionals, transitions work best when career stage aligns with firm needs. For clients, institutional-grade capabilities are increasingly accessible outside major banks – though often with interesting caveats about scale and scope.
Perhaps the real insight isn’t about what institutional knowledge becomes private, but what remains irreducibly institutional. The methodologies are travelling just fine. It’s the infrastructure that’s proving harder to pack.
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