Good credit

You'll find the family regularly swishing through ski fields and enjoying an activity that has not only become a shared interest but a family tradition.

"My kids are both now much better than I am; they're 19 and 16 years old and just want to go fast on the trickiest runs. While I prefer to cruise nowadays and avoid busting a knee, I find skiing is a great way to combine two things that I love. We go at least once a year," he says.

Miall is an all-round active person. Cycling and triathlons are additional hobbies that if he doesn't do on a regular basis, he starts to get a twitch.

Being active, in terms of how he approaches investing and managing a portfolio and broadly from an investment point of view, also carries through nicely in the professional field.

"I have somewhat of a rare breadth of experience in credit markets, compared to someone who came from a more traditional route of investment banking and leverage finance and then entered private debt investing," he says.

Miall's DNA is in bottom-up credit research that has stayed with him in his nearly 30-year career.

Miall started in commercial and institutional lending with Sanwa Bank (which is now part of MUFG), Commonwealth Bank, and BNP Paribas, then cut his teeth early in what is still the private debt market, albeit on the bank side.

He then moved to Fitch Ratings where he became a director of corporate ratings, and gained valuable experience understanding rating agency methodologies, conducting detailed credit due diligence and assigning credit ratings.

"Then at Westpac institutional bank, I was on the sell-side as director, capital markets research, writing credit research publications based in Sydney. This was part of Bill Evans' team (Westpac's then chief economist) and was a great role for gauging the pulse of the market and investor sentiment," he says.

Miall eventually wanted to move to the buy side and have 'skin in the game'. He found an opportunity with UBS Asset Management in 2007 and, three years later, he finished there as head of credit research for APAC.

"Then I joined QIC and moved back to Brisbane. In QIC's liquid markets group for more than a decade, I led the credit team for most of that time investing in the corporate bond market both domestically and internationally, as well as synthetic credit and securitisation," he says.

At the peak, it had about $17 billion worth of credit assets under management (AUM).

Back in 2020, QIC could see the momentum building in the private debt space and decided to establish a dedicated business unit that would become a key part of its growth strategy.

The following year, QIC launched the unit, comprising two teams: private debt, Australia, which Miall leads, and private debt infrastructure. The private debt unit has a total of 18 team members.

Miall's breadth of experience across credit markets and financial markets has given him a distinct blend of top-down and bottom-up credit expertise.

"The foundation in investment selection and agility in identifying opportunities across sectors, industries and investments, as well as investments to pass on, are great assets for my current role as head of QIC's private debt Australia team," he notes.

QIC is both a sovereign investor, as QIC State Investments, and an institutional fund manager.

QIC State Investments is the investor and manager for various pools of Queensland government capital and QIC's foundation client.

"While our sovereign ownership provides us with stability, QIC is independent and operates both as a limited partner (LP) and general partner (GP) with a commercial mindset," he says.

Meanwhile, QIC Private Debt is one of the institutional funds management businesses. It originates private debt investments for both government and non-government clients, such as superannuation funds, insurance companies, and other institutional investors.

QIC made a record $8.9 billion in earnings to Queensland government clients in the 2024 financial year and had $111.7 billion in AUM.

Miall says one of his key learnings during his career is how "vital" active management is in this business.

"Active management is vital to good long term investment outcomes," he says.

"That aligns with our DNA and philosophy for our clients. While active management is important in public markets, it is even more critical in private debt. You're investing to hold to maturity, not to trade the position, and so in the long term you will live or die by your investment selection."

Another key is learning how to protect from the downside and to take more active risk in the dislocation periods.

When liquidity is scarce, Miall says that's often the time to 'fill your boots' but always with a discerning approach to selecting the right deals.

"Looking at dislocations and downturns as an opportunity can create significant value, rather than looking at it the other way," he says.

The popularity of the private debt asset class has boomed in recent years. Much of this stems from bank disintermediation.

Miall explains that on the supply side, banks are generally pulling back from certain sectors in the market because they're not earning the return on capital they need to. Regulation has also forced them to hold more capital and with banks pulling back in some sectors it's leaving a funding gap.

"In Australia, there's no high-yield bond market to fill that. Essentially, private lenders are filling that funding gap. Australia's private debt AUM has grown at more than 20% per annum compound annual growth rate since 2015 when bank capital regulation started to bite," he says.

"We think that there's likely to be further strong growth in Australia's private debt market over the coming years, perhaps not at over 20% p.a., but still significant growth."

The reasons, Miall points out, are continued bank disintermediation and the fact that Australian banks still hold a significant market share of corporate and real estate loans.

"Looking at this market share of Australian banks versus those in US and Europe, in Australia it's over 70%, whereas in Europe and the US, it's less than 60% and 40% respectively," Miall says.

"If Australia's bank market share follows that path, then there's going to be a growing funding gap that private debt investors can help fill, supporting the market's growth."

After attending high school in Brisbane and studying a Bachelor of Commerce at the University of Queensland, Miall dipped his toe in accounting at the dawn of his career with Deloitte.

While he also studied to be a Certified Public Accountant (CPA), he found early on that accounting just wasn't for him.

"My kids are at the age where they're often thinking about their future career-wise. The landscape and options for them are very different to when I started out and I say to them, 'find something you're passionate about, be prepared to work hard, and be confident in promoting yourself and influencing outcomes," Miall says.

"If you stick to these three things, you should find the right path for you and land on your feet."