Robert Stark, CEO of Nomura Capital Management, asked as many as fifty registered investment advisers how they wanted to own private credit, from $250 million shops to multibillion-dollar practices. On Private Capital, he told Joe Reilly that nearly all of them gave the same answer.
Robert expected sophisticated allocators to want specialized, rotating bets on niches such as aircraft leasing or music royalties. They wanted a single fund spread across the whole asset class instead.
"We gave them like the red pill and the blue pill... My hypothesis was they want the red pill. It did turn out that pretty much everyone wanted the blue pill." — Robert Stark
Robert spent ten years advising asset managers at McKinsey, then ran strategy and later distribution at JPMorgan Asset & Wealth Management, learned the non-traded fund business at FS Investments and tried to build his own private credit firm before taking the idea inside Nomura. He is also Head of Investment Management in the Americas for the Nomura Group.
The full interview is covered here so you can skip it. 47 minutes of audio, 11 minutes of reading.
Here are the 10 lessons that matter.
Private Capital: Intelligence for the Family Office Investor · Oct 13, 2026 · 47m · 36m saved
With Robert Stark, CEO of Nomura Capital Management and Head of Investment Management in the Americas for the Nomura Group
Key Takeaways
Wealth managers want one diversified private credit fund, not a menu of niches
Robert expected the opposite when he asked RIAs before launching
Private credit is far broader than direct lending, even though fund structures made the two words synonyms
An independent private credit startup is hard to finance, which is why Robert built his inside Nomura
The 5% quarterly repurchase limit protects every investor in a fund, Robert says, and is not a sign of distress
Model portfolios all look alike, so the edge is in tactical shifts and how efficiently they are carried out
Buying Macquarie's US and European public-markets business changed Nomura's weight in the US, adding a large wholesaler network
Nomura uses AI for research and meeting preparation, not to run portfolios, because private-markets data is too thin
1. From Advising to Doing
Robert opened on his ten years at McKinsey serving asset managers. He described consulting as a comfortable seat for criticism: a consultant always has benchmarks, never attacks an individual and can speak freely in a way an insider cannot. That is why many CEOs lean on consultants, he said: the job can be lonely at the top.
McKinsey taught Robert that a firm outlasts the person who hires the consultant
"The client is never the individual. The client is always the organization because it's the organization that prevails." — Robert Stark
What wore on him was never getting to carry out his own recommendations, in an industry he saw in constant change: index funds, then ETFs, then model portfolios and alternatives; money moving from institutions to wealthy individuals; defined-benefit pensions giving way to defined-contribution plans. With the travel growing as he became more senior, he moved to a strategy role at JPMorgan Asset & Wealth Management in 2012.
Moving to JPMorgan was like going from commentator to player
"You're not no longer like commentating or looking at the pitch. You're actually on the pitch. You're one of the players." — Robert Stark
