Macquarie Asset Management Brand Guidelines: A 1994 Sydney Motorway, MIRA & a Holey Dollar

A three-person office and a governor’s name.

Macquarie Asset Management is the asset-management arm of Macquarie Group, the Sydney financial group, and its story starts with the parent. On 10 December 1969, Macquarie says, its predecessor Hill Samuel Australia opened at Gold Fields House in Sydney with three employees, as a wholly owned subsidiary of the British merchant bank Hill Samuel & Co. English Wikipedia describes the same start and names Stan Owens as the executive chairman who set it up.

The Macquarie name arrived in 1985, when the firm was granted an Australian banking licence and became Macquarie Bank Limited. The company says it chose the name of Lachlan Macquarie, an early governor of New South Wales, and that the new logo was inspired by the Holey Dollar, the punched Spanish coin he introduced in 1814 to ease a currency shortage. English Wikipedia also describes the group’s logo as a stylised version of that coin. The bank listed on the Australian Securities Exchange in July 1996, and a non-operating holding company, Macquarie Group Limited, was approved in 2007, according to English Wikipedia.

The infrastructure business, which became the core of Macquarie Asset Management’s reputation, began with a road. In 1994, the company says, Macquarie arranged the financing for Sydney’s M2 Motorway and placed publicly listed equity for it; the Hills Motorway Trust listed in December 1994, and Macquarie calls that deal the start of its infrastructure investment business. English Wikipedia gives the same 1994 starting point.

Funds followed. Macquarie says it set up a Global Infrastructure Fund in January 2001 to invest in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and the European Union, with the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel among its first acquisitions; the Macquarie Korea Infrastructure Fund followed in December 2002, and a second global fund in 2003. English Wikipedia adds that infrastructure funds were set up in Korea, China, Europe, Russia, India and the Middle East during that decade, and that Macquarie Infrastructure Company began trading on the New York Stock Exchange in December 2004.

MIRA, green investment and a narrower focus.

For years the infrastructure side carried its own name. In August 2021, in a release headed by the Macquarie Asset Management name, Macquarie still described its infrastructure head as leading Macquarie Infrastructure and Real Assets, the division known as MIRA. The old MIRA web address now leads to the Macquarie Asset Management pages, which today present infrastructure alongside credit, real estate, green investments, agriculture, secondaries and insurance.

The asset manager also grew through purchases outside infrastructure. Macquarie says it completed the purchase of the US manager Delaware Investments in January 2010, agreed to buy Waddell & Reed in December 2020 and completed that deal in April 2021, and took over AMP Capital’s global equities and fixed-income business in March 2022. English Wikipedia notes that the unit was formerly called Macquarie Funds.

One of its most documented deals was green. On 18 August 2017 the UK government announced that the sale of the Green Investment Bank to Macquarie Group had been completed. The government said the business would be renamed Green Investment Group so that it could invest overseas, would keep an office in Edinburgh, and would carry a green “special share” held by the Green Purposes Company, whose five independent trustees can approve or reject changes to its green purposes. Macquarie Asset Management now lists green investments as one of its sectors.

Its UK water holdings have been followed closely by the press. In August 2021 The Guardian reported that Macquarie had bought a majority stake in Southern Water, four and a half years after it sold its stake in Thames Water, and that the water regulator Ofwat had written to Macquarie saying “very profound changes” would be required at Southern Water. The newspaper also reported criticism of the debt Thames Water carried under Macquarie’s ownership.

How infrastructure investors present themselves.

Infrastructure investors sell something hard to picture: long-term ownership of things other people use every day. Their websites therefore lean on the assets themselves. Macquarie Asset Management’s pages open on named portfolio companies, from a New Zealand telecoms provider to an onshore wind farm in north-eastern Brazil, and Brookfield Infrastructure sorts its portfolio into utilities, transport, midstream and data, with ports, railways, toll roads and pipelines named as the things it owns and runs.

The language is consistent too. Brookfield Infrastructure speaks of “critical infrastructure” and long-life assets with contracted and regulated revenues; Macquarie Asset Management says it seeks results “over the long term.” Responsible-investment wording sits alongside it: Macquarie’s purchase of the former UK Green Investment Bank in 2017, renamed Green Investment Group, came with a green “special share” held by independent trustees, according to the UK government’s announcement of the sale.

Listed vehicles add another layer of documents. Brookfield Infrastructure publishes quarterly results, supplemental information, letters to unitholders and investor-day presentations, and in 2026 it set out a plan to fold its two listed securities into one. Parent groups publish annual reports and history timelines; Macquarie’s runs from a three-person Sydney office in 1969 to the motorway deal of 1994 that it calls the start of its infrastructure business.

Trade rankings are part of the picture. Infrastructure Investor’s II 100 list of managers placed GIP, by then part of BlackRock, at the top in November 2024, and noted that Macquarie, first in every earlier edition, had dropped to fourth. This guide sets out what can be checked about each firm — who founded it, who owns it and how it presents its portfolio — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From the top of the ranking to a reshaped manager.

Macquarie long sat at the top of one trade ranking. In November 2024 Infrastructure Investor reported that Macquarie, which had topped its II 100 list since the ranking began, had dropped to fourth place, with GIP, by then part of BlackRock, in first.

The business has since narrowed. Macquarie’s history page says Macquarie Asset Management completed the sale of its public investments business in North America and Europe — equities, fixed income and multi-asset strategies — to the Japanese group Nomura, a deal English Wikipedia says was agreed in April 2025. The same page says that in 2025 Macquarie Asset Management, for two of its infrastructure funds and their co-investors, agreed to sell the US operator Aligned Data Centers.

On its own website Macquarie Asset Management calls itself “a leading global asset manager” and says its infrastructure investments are relied on by more than 310 million people a day. Its portfolio pages feature named companies: the New Zealand telecoms provider 2degrees, the Ventos de São Zacarias onshore wind farm in north-eastern Brazil and the UK rental-housing platform Goodstone are among those it features.

For a design guide, Macquarie Asset Management shows how a business can keep a parent’s mark — a coin from the colony’s early years — while its own divisions and names change around it. Compare Brookfield Infrastructure, a listed owner that grew out of a Canadian parent, and GIP, the manager that overtook Macquarie in the 2024 ranking. For this guide we use slate, sandstone and a bronze with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Macquarie Asset Management’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.