Hong Kong SAR-based Flow Capital Partners was established in 2019 in a way that says much about the Asian private credit market. It was not launched from a theoretical whiteboard exercise, but from a series of calls to founder Sam Lau from borrowers and intermediaries seeking short-term liquidity for real estate projects.
Lau – described as a serial entrepreneur and a former investment banker at Deutsche Bank – had spent years building relationships across Hong Kong SAR’s real estate and finance community. In 2016, Lau had founded Heungkong Financial Group (later renamed Futec Financial Group) which offered investment banking, brokerage, securities and investment management services in the financial hub.1
In the early days, those relationships were the deal flow for Flow Capital Partners. “It was only after enough of those deals came through, that we recognised what we were actually looking at: a structural gap, not a string of one-offs,” reports Chief Operating Officer Stephen Yeung in an interview with flow. Yeung, who joined the firm from Nexus Investment Advisers in April 2025, adds: “Banks were pulling back from mid-market lending as capital requirements tightened, and the large funds were too big to efficiently underwrite transactions at this scale.” Around the same time, Jacky Tian joined as Chief Investment Officer, having previously worked for over 10 years at Oaktree and Goldman Sachs in Hong Kong SAR.
Historically, credit supply in Asia-Pacific (APAC) is heavily bank-driven, with banks still controlling 75% of the market. At the same time, public capital markets remain underdeveloped, contributing just 14% of global bond issuances despite APAC’s large share of global GDP.2
The gap between limited credit supply for mid-sized companies and rising demand for flexible capital amid strong economic growth makes APAC increasingly attractive for private credit solutions. Consequently, the APAC private credit market is projected to grow from US$59bn in 2024 to US$92bn by 2027, according to a report from the Alternative Investment Management Association.3
Figure 1: Growth of the Asia private credit market
Flow Capital Partners positioned itself in that gap – and seven years after its foundation, the firm has grown into an institutional alternative asset manager focused on full-spectrum credit investment across APAC. Its strategy is sector-agnostic but anchored in structural complexity: senior secured lending, real estate-backed credit, asset-backed finance, sponsor-backed financing, platform financing, cross-border financing and special situations, with a typical ticket size of between US$10m and US$50m, extending to US$100m for select transactions alongside Limited Partners (LP) co-investment.
By mid-2025, the firm had participated in 20 investments with a total transaction value of about US$871m via a deal-by-deal basis. In June 2025, it launched the Flow Credit Master Fund with US$125m of seed capital, marking a shift from deal-by-deal origination towards a fund-based platform.4 Since launch to date, the open-ended fund has invested US$234m across 13 deals; with three deals (US$57m) already matured and returned. US$177m remains actively invested – bringing total sourced and managed investments since 2019 up to US$1.1bn.
“Currently, most of our investors – which are small institutional investors and high-net-worth-individuals – are based in Asia, but we are actively expanding our reach: registration processes are underway in Korea, and we’re evaluating market entry opportunities in Europe,” explains Yeung. “While our investment focus is Asia Pacific private credit, we believe the strategy has strong appeal to global investors seeking exposure to the region’s growing private credit market.”