Private equity firm Β· Singapore
Affirma Capital
About
Affirma Capital is an Asia- and Africa-focused private equity firm that spun out of Standard Chartered Private Equity in 2019, investing in growth-stage companies across the region.
APAC secondaries activity
As an independent successor to a bank-affiliated PE platform, Affirma Capital represents a category of buyer increasingly active in Southeast Asian growth-company secondaries: institutional, regionally focused, and unconstrained by a parent bank's balance sheet.
What a transaction here looks like
A manager that emerged from a bank's principal investment business carries a portfolio assembled under a previous owner, which is one of the classic sources of secondary supply: assets that need managing to an exit under a new structure, with investors who want visibility on when capital comes back.
Who sits on the other side
Counterparties are the institutions holding those positions and the buyers willing to take them on. Spin-outs of this kind are worth understanding as a category β when a bank exits principal investing, the portfolio does not disappear, it moves, and the transaction that moves it is a secondary.