Macquarie taps CPPIB for secondaries MD

Macquarie Asset Management has made a senior hire in its fast-growing infrastructure secondaries team.

The real assets giant has appointed Irina Luckey as a managing director focused on Europe, the Middle East and Africa, according to a statement seen by affiliate title Infrastructure Investor. She will be based in the firm’s London office.

Luckey joins Macquarie from CPP Investments, where she spent seven years focusing on infrastructure investments, the statement said. Luckey has gone full circle, having begun her career at Macquarie in 2007.

Her appointment brings the number of people in Macquarie’s secondaries team to nine, eight of which are investment professionals, according to managing director Wandy Hoh.

Secondaries Investor reported in April 2021 that Hoh had joined Macquarie to lead the build-out of the team. She came from infrastructure investor Glenfarne Group, having been at secondaries shop DLJ/Credit Suisse Strategic Partners, now a part of Blackstone, between 1999 and 2006.

Hoh was subsequently joined by vice-president Bryan Beach and senior vice-president Bing Wong, Secondaries Investor reported. The former private markets head at Pennsylvania Public School Employees Retirement System, Charles Spiller, joined earlier this year as a senior adviser.

The infrastructure secondaries team has already invested $500 million in LP-led and GP-led deals.

“Diversification is key, not just by manager but by fund and by underlying sector and vintage,” Hoh told Secondaries Investor. “Of course, by buying LP portfolios you can do that very quickly. When we think about more concentrated types of investments, we are really focused on sectors that we particularly like and on the secondaries attributes of those investments.”

Macquarie estimates there could be between $50 billion and $67 billion of infrastructure secondaries assets under management by 2025, compared with $18.6 billion last year. This is based on the market following the same growth trajectory as the private equity secondaries markets and the primary infrastructure market hitting $2.1 trillion by the same year.

“Investors are really now on the private fund side taking a more sophisticated, mature approach to actively managing their portfolios… What we saw a lot of last year was GP-led deals combined with some really large portfolios. I think we will also have that this year but in addition, more activity on the LP portfolio side across a range of different sizes,” said Hoh.