KeyInvest targets private credit with new platform

Binaya Dahal

Journalist

23 June 2026

Mutual society KeyInvest has launched a new investment platform, aimed at providing advisers and wholesale investors with access to niche segments of financial markets that are typically harder to access through traditional products.

Unveiled on Monday, KeyInvest Managed Investments (KIMI) will initially focus on private credit as its core allocation with the solution structured as a multi-manager offering, and plans to expand into listed equities strategies over time as additional mandates are added.

Managing director and chief executive Craig Brooke said the platform builds on the organisation’s long institutional history of investing through multiple market cycles.

“Since 1878 we have invested through world wars, economic depressions, financial crises, and periods of extraordinary economic expansion,” Brooke said.

“Across those cycles markets have changed significantly, but certain principles about successful investing remain consistent.”

Brooke said the platform is targeting areas of the market shaped by structural constraints, including regulation and complexity, which he argued can create opportunities for active managers.

The launch comes at a time when Australian private credit has expanded sharply, growing from about $130 billion at the end of 2021 to roughly $225 billion by the end of 2025.

While admitting into its diversified multi-manager portfolio, KeyInvest reviewed more than 300 Australian private credit managers but said only 12 met the highest standards of governance, scale, and track record required to participate. 

The group said the screening process focused on governance standards, scale and track record, with the aim of concentrating exposure among what it considers institutional-quality operators.

“That discipline is what protects investors,” said KIMI executive director Ciaran McAssey. “By combining best-in-breed managers into a single diversified portfolio, we unlock sources of alpha that a single-manager approach simply cannot access.”

McAssey said the platform also addresses concerns around opacity in private credit markets by providing portfolio look-through capabilities that give investors greater visibility over underlying exposures.

“Unlike many private credit offerings where underlying exposures remain largely opaque, KIMI has built the platform around institutional-grade transparency,” he said.

The first strategy on the platform, the KeyInvest Senior Debt Income Fund, invests in senior secured loans backed by first-ranking mortgages over real assets including property and infrastructure.

It is targeting returns of the RBA’s cash rate plus 5% per annum (net of fees), with monthly income distributions. The Fund is initially available to wholesale clients under the Corporations Act 2001 (Cth), with the potential for broader access through retail structures in the future.