Macquarie Asset Management

Ben Way is the Group Head of Macquarie Asset Management, overseeing the consolidated real assets, private credit, and equities divisions. He reports to Macquarie Group CEO Shemara Wikramanayake, who spent much of her earlier career building the infrastructure funds business. Investment decisions are delegated to portfolio managers within each specialist team, with the real assets division maintaining separate investment committees for infrastructure, real estate, and agriculture.

MAM sources deals through a combination of its 22-office global footprint, the Macquarie Group advisory and trading relationships, and long-standing operating partner networks. The firm's corporate carve-out capability is a distinctive pipeline: it often acquires infrastructure assets directly from industrial owners and utilities who are not running formal auction processes. In agriculture, its established origination teams in Australia and Brazil buy land and operating companies through bilateral negotiations rather than brokered processes.

MAM manages commingled funds, separate accounts, and listed vehicles, but its model is unusually hands-on: it directly operates platform companies in infrastructure and agriculture. Its Australian grain business, for example, runs physical storage and logistics networks rather than acting as a passive financial owner. This operating capability is rare among institutional asset managers and stems from Macquarie's merchant banking roots.

Macquarie typically leads or co-sponsors deals through its own managed funds rather than co-investing passively alongside other general partners. The firm's institutional separate accounts and its listed infrastructure funds structure allows large limited partners to co-invest directly on a deal-by-deal basis, which MAM facilitates for sovereign wealth fund and Canadian pension clients.

MAM explicitly avoids early-stage venture capital and growth equity outside its specialized Macquarie Capital venture arm, which operates adjacent to the asset management division. Within private credit, it stays almost entirely in senior secured direct lending and avoids distressed debt and high-yield trading strategies. In real estate, the firm has publicly shifted away from office and retail assets in favor of logistics and residential.

MAM is one of four operating divisions of Macquarie Group, a publicly traded Australian financial conglomerate. It sits alongside Macquarie Capital (advisory and principal investing), Commodities and Global Markets (sales and trading), and Banking and Financial Services (retail and business banking). The asset management division is physically and operationally separated from the trading businesses, with its own balance sheet, risk systems, and governance, though Macquarie Group's appetite for seeding new strategies with proprietary capital creates an unusual alignment mechanism not found at independent managers.

MAM's infrastructure portfolio is weighted toward Europe and North America, where its largest asset holdings include UK utility networks, European offshore wind transmission, and North American digital infrastructure. Its Macquarie European Infrastructure Fund series has been a primary deployment vehicle for OECD-regulated assets, while the US-focused Macquarie Infrastructure Partners funds target mid-market infrastructure. The Australian portfolio, where the firm began, remains a meaningful but proportional minority of overall infrastructure assets under management.