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As QIC Infrastructure celebrates its 20th anniversary and surpasses A$40bn in assets under management, building resilient, optimised capital structures continues to be a critical part of their active asset management approach - particularly in the current dynamic macro environment.
Over the past 12 months alone, the team has overseen 21 financing processes across the infrastructure portfolio - raising approximately A$17 billion across bank and capital markets.
In this Q&A, Matthew Hall, Partner - Financing, QIC Infrastructure, shares how they manage capital structures, support portfolio companies through financing processes, and seek to maintain resilience through periods of market volatility to deliver strong outcomes for clients.
What is QIC Infrastructure's approach to capital management?
We take a disciplined, through-the-cycle approach focused on delivering strong outcomes for clients. Our priority is to ensure capital structures:
- Are optimised to maximise long-term value
- Provide flexibility to execute asset strategies, ensuring financing enables growth rather than constraining it
- Remain resilient through market and economic cycles, supported by prudent leverage and investment-grade positioning
- Reflect active capital discipline, with financial policies calibrated to the characteristics and strategy of each asset.
At its core, our philosophy is clear: capital structures should seek to enhance returns while managing downside risk.
What differentiates QIC is that our financing expertise is embedded within our asset management approach – enabling more proactive, integrated decision making.
How do you support portfolio companies on financing matters?
We operate as an integrated financing partner, tailoring our support to each portfolio company. This ranges from strategic input at Board level on capital structure, ratings and financing strategy, through to hands-on execution support alongside management teams on refinancing, hedging and capital markets processes.
Importantly, we bring a consistent portfolio-wide lens, sharing and applying financing best practice across terms, conditions and policies. This enables portfolio companies to benefit from QIC’s global experience and deep lending relationships.
Can you share a few examples of recent financings you have been involved with?
Recent transactions highlight our proactive approach:
These examples demonstrate our proactive approach to support optimised, resilient capital structures through market cycles, with a focus on diversified access to capital, proactive maturity management and disciplined risk management.
Why is diversification important in your financing strategy?
We see it as central to financing resilience and actively diversify across:
- Geographies
- Financing markets and products
- Individual capital providers
- Tenors and maturities.
With more than A$55 billion of total portfolio debt exposure, the portfolio is well diversified across bank and debt capital markets- including AMTN, USPP, Euro, Asian Term Loan and private credit markets. Within each source of capital, lending relationships are further diversified by geographic origin, including North America, Australia/New Zealand, Asia and Europe.
This supports consistent access to capital in both constructive and dislocated markets, which is critical for long-term infrastructure assets.
It also helps ensure that no single market or capital provider becomes a point of potential failure in our financing structures.
How do you manage debt maturities?
We take a proactive, forward-looking approach alongside portfolio company management teams to manage maturities and minimise refinancing risk through strategies including:
- Staggered maturity profiles to avoid refinancing concentration
- A long-tenor bias that reflects the enduring nature of the underlying assets and portfolios
- Early refinancing execution to avoid forced market conditions
- Active monitoring of covenant headroom and liquidity.
Our objective is clear: no single market event should materially disrupt our capital structures.
How are foreign currency and interest rate risks managed?
The management of risk begins at signing, where we typically seek to contingently hedge exposures at both the fund and portfolio company level either through vanilla hedges, or the use of deal-contingent instruments.
We support portfolio companies in implementing policies that ensure foreign currency and interest rate exposures are maintained, including:
- Appropriate level of hedged or fixed-rate debt exposure
- Diversification of hedge tenors and maturities
- Use of hedge counterparties, each with high-quality credit ratings
At the fund level, we maintain foreign currency hedging strategies to mitigate the impact of currency movements on asset values and returns. To align more closely with longer infrastructure hold periods, QIC typically seeks to execute longer-dated, uncollateralised foreign currency hedges with diversified settlement dates.
How does the current Middle East conflict impact capital markets and financing conditions?
To date, primary impacts have been largely indirect - driven by market sentiment, volatility and the absolute level of interest rates - rather than any structural shift in appetite for, or availability of, credit for infrastructure. Short-term volatility can however reinforce demand for defensive, inflation-linked assets through a flight to quality.
Ultimately, we recognise that markets inevitably experience cycles and shocks - from COVID-19 and the global financial crisis to geopolitical and macroeconomic events.
Our approach is to ensure the portfolio is prepared to withstand those conditions, which is why we take a holistic approach to capital management through diversification, maturity management, liquidity, covenant headroom and hedging.
Looking ahead, what is your focus over the next 12 months?
Our priority is to maintain resilience while positioning assets to capture value-enhancing opportunities as they arise in credit markets. This includes maintaining disciplined execution, addressing refinancing requirements well ahead of maturity, preserving liquidity and covenant headroom, and selectively using favourable market windows where they can improve long-term outcomes for clients.
More broadly, it reinforces the value of active asset management: ensuring capital structures remain fit for purpose as markets evolve, while supporting growth, protecting downside risk and maximise long-term value for our clients.
Citations
All data as at July 2026
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