After a decade in M&A across Asia-Pacific, the founder of Rixon Capital made a strategic leap into SME private credit—culminating in the launch of a boutique fund manager in 2022. With a hands-on, investor-first approach and a focus on differentiated strategies, he’s reshaping how trust and transparency look in modern fund management.
How did you start down this career path?
I spent over a decade as an investment banker in M&A with Macquarie Capital in Singapore and Australia, and a boutique M&A advisor in Sydney. In 2018 the M&A boutique established one of the first SME private credit funds in Australia, which saw me transition from corporate advisory to funds management.
Following this I managed an SME private credit strategy investing on behalf of institutional investors before launching my own fund manager, Rixon Capital in 2022.
What inspires you in your role/industry? Why?
As fund managers we are honoured with the privileged position of being trusted guardians of sometimes substantial proportions of individual and family financial legacies.
Rixon Capital is a boutique strategy, which means we know most of our investors personally. My greatest inspiration is when investor send emails and SMS’ of thanks when a months’ return has been above guidance, or in the case in 2Q this year – when the rest of their portfolio dipped deep into the red!
What’s your approach to customer service that separates you from the rest?
As a fund manager that launched without institutional support, we built our fund base through numerous single cheques from individual wholesale investors. As a result, we see our investors as individuals rather than an impersonal capital pool. This very human relationship paired with being a boutique fund strategy means we are willing and able to offer our investors – regardless of cheque size – direct access to the investment team and firm principals. Our philosophy is that so long as we earn a Management Fee from an investor’s allocated funds, that investor has a right to ask questions and request face-to-face meetings if they so require. In addition, we have found some investors prefer to receive portfolio updates from the fund manager themselves versus a business development executive.
How do you innovate and stay ahead of industry trends?
As a firm we actively seek opportunities to improve credit underwriting to better manage risk while maintaining returns. As an SME lender we study loan and covenant structures being developed in the institutional debt market to identify innovations that we can adopt to enhance risk management.
What is the toughest challenge you’ve faced in your role? How did you overcome it?
Raising capital as an emerging and boutique fund manager was a meaningful challenge.
Emerging meant having to convince sophisticated investors that our proposition offered a superior risk-adjusted return than the many established, mainstream strategies in the market
Boutique meant being less appealing to allocators who were seeking to deploy regular, large cheques.
Add to this that my career had focused on execution rather than distribution.
However, we were blessed to receive good advice from well-wishers on our journey, with the three points below paying great dividends (or should I say high yield interest payments):
Be different | a clearly differentiated strategy will maximise the odds of getting a meeting
Have conviction | we identified weaknesses in our asset class, adopted what we believed were best practice (often to our detriment), and told everyone about it – loudly!
Deliver what you say you will do | investors respect consistency and transparency
What are some of your goals for the next 5 years?
We aim to be a boutique multi-asset manager.
While building and managing a billion-dollar fund strategy is appealing at face value, experience has taught us that being different – even if it means being smaller and niche – will allow us to deliver an outsize risk-reward proposition to our investors.
About Rixon Capital
Rixon Capital is the investment manager of the Rixon Income Fund (“Fund”), an asset-backed SME private credit strategy that requires all loans to reflect the following characteristics:
First ranking and senior secured
Registered security over recoverable real assets (e.g. receivables, plant, property, equipment)
No property or property development lending
The Fund is focused on offering non-dilutionary, institutional grade lending in the underbanked sub-$20m SME lending niche.
Rixon Capital seeks to deliver investors regular monthly income with a 10-12% p.a. Target Return by accessing a scarcity premium rather than a risk premium.
While the Fund is the flagship strategy, in 2Q 2025 Rixon Capital launched the high-yield Rixon Credit Opportunities Fund which has a Target Return of in excess of 10.0% + RBA Cash Rate to access a different underbanked segment in the sub-$20m SME lending niche.
Learn more about Rixon Capital, our funds, and the investment team and Investment committee by clicking here.
