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Deutsche Bank’s former ANZ boss James McMurdo and ex Goldman Sachs MD Sean Walsh know there are fortunes to be made in the booming private credit sector. And they’ve drafted in a US merchant bank to light the way to the loot.

Street Talk can reveal McMurdo and Walsh’s Privatus Capital Partners has signed an agreement with New York’s BDT & MSD Partners, a high-net-worth advisory firm formed this year by the merger of two companies – one founded by ex Goldman Sachs investment banking vice chair Byron Trott, and the other an entity that has invested Dell Technologies founder Michael Dell’s billions since 2009.

Privatus is expected to set up an Australian “feeder fund” to funnel the Vaucluse and Toorak crowd into BDT & MSD’s private lending vehicles. Privatus’ team on Friday began mailing out fund-raising documents to potential backers, telling them the fund would be an open-ended vehicle and circumvent US taxation burdens.

Walsh was Goldman Sachs’ co-head of local financing group, and held a board seat at the Wall Street bank’s Australian board when he ‘retired’ in 2019. He had overseen some of the firm’s biggest deals including Medibank Private’s blockbuster $5.7 billion IPO in 2014.

His business partner, McMurdo climbed up the ladder from UBS’s head of industrials coverage to Deutsche Bank’s CEO for Australia and New Zealand and then its APAC head of corporate investment banking.

Both men enjoyed banking careers that other MDs could only dream of but in 2021 set up Privatus, perhaps recognising that tending to rich families’ investment needs is more lucrative – and less stressful – than advising ASX-listed large caps on M&A and raisings.

Read the full story tomorrow and more on the Street Talk page.

Payments player and IPO hopeful Cuscal is worth $527 million to $656 million and better value than ASX-listed Tyro Payments and Smartpay, per marketing research published by Bank of America overnight.

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