Capital Advisory - Partner & Team Search

Capital advisory has structurally re-rated in the higher-for-longer rate era, and its talent market with it - most visibly in Singapore and Hong Kong, the two booking centres for Asian private credit and equity capital. As low-cost debt raised in the cheap-money years matures and banks lend more selectively, a widening funding gap is pushing borrowers toward non-bank capital and toward advisers who can navigate it ^[1]. Refinancing, recapitalisation and capital-structure advice - once episodic - have become a continuous fee stream, and firms are building dedicated debt-advisory benches in both hubs to capture it.

Private credit is the engine of that re-rating. Asia-Pacific private-credit AUM is projected to climb from about US$59 billion in 2024 to US$92 billion by 2027, with Hong Kong (alongside Australia, India and South Korea) named among the key growth markets in Knight Frank's US$90-110 billion three-year opportunity and Singapore the principal fund-domicile and structuring hub for the region's credit funds ^[1][2]. Crucially, around 90% of APAC private-credit deals are sponsorless - borrowers without PE backing - which is precisely the mid-market, advice-dependent segment where independent capital advisers add the most value and win the most mandates ^[1].

The hiring challenge is that this is a young discipline in Singapore and Hong Kong with a shallow senior talent pool. Genuine debt-advisory partners - people who can structure a refinancing, run a lender process, and broker between banks, private-credit funds and borrowers - are scarce, and they are being competed for by accounting firms, boutiques, the banks themselves and the credit funds clustered in the two hubs. Candidates who carry live lender and fund relationships across both the bank and non-bank universe are the rarest and most aggressively pursued.

Equity capital advisory adds a second, more cyclical leg, and Hong Kong's 2025 IPO revival put it front and centre: HKEX raised roughly HK$280 billion across over 110 listings (up around 218%) to reclaim the world's number-one ranking, reopening pre-IPO advisory and private-placement mandates that had been dormant ^[3]. SGX and HKEX windows open and close with sentiment, so firms want capital advisers who can flex between debt and equity as conditions shift - pre-IPO and private placements when equity markets are receptive, debt and recapitalisation when they are not. That dual-track capability, paired with strong Singapore- and Hong-Kong-centred investor and lender networks, defines the most valuable senior hires in this space.