"Diversification is not aspirational. It's hard work."
This Opalesque VIRTUAL MANAGER VISIT takes us to London's Soho district to meet Fasanara Capital. Over 15 years the firm has grown from a specialist in technology-enabled asset-based finance into a global alternative investment platform covering private credit, digital assets and quantitative trading.
Fasanara is now Europe's most granular home-grown multi-strategy platform, with around 200 independent alpha pods. Unlike its US peers, it did not raise a war chest to outbid them for PM talent. It was funded by a fintech credit business that has been running since 2011.
In this Virtual Manager Visit, founder Francesco Filia and his team explain how they built the platform:
- Short duration, small tickets, no leverage: How Fasanara scaled to more than 3 million consumer and SME credit positions through a network of 139 origination platforms across 60 countries. Around $7.5 billion is managed, and most credit products are unlevered and target high single-digit returns.
- Specialist teams on a shared backbone: Investment teams run their own strategies independently. Risk, operations, legal, compliance, data, technology and AI are shared across the firm, so new strategies can be added without new layers of bureaucracy.
- A next-generation multi-strategy fund: Credit, digital assets and quant are combined in one semi-liquid portfolio, giving on-chain and off-chain, private and public exposure.
- Fasanara Open Quant: A multi-manager fund that gives investors access to capacity-constrained emerging quant managers through managed accounts. It currently has 32 strategies invested and more than 150 in the pipeline.
- Fasanara Digital: A market-neutral liquidity provider since 2018. It is positioned for the point when traditional finance moves to 24/7 trading and tokenised assets.
- Taming the three main risks: How the firm deals with concentration, long duration and leverage, for an investor base that is 90% institutional and increasingly includes family offices and wealth managers.
"We don't take punts. We don't speculate up and down the markets, but we try to manufacture this market stability and the stability of income."
Chapters
01:18 The genesis and philosophy of Fasanara
03:28 Fasanara's "secret sauce"
05:02 How Fasanara cracked scaling up to over 3 million positions in consumer credit
08:37 Real economy impact
10:01 Giving teams complete ownership to keep the entrepreneurial spirit
13:27 How to scale a multi-strategy hedge fund
16:23 Thinking ten years ahead: from silos to total portfolio investing
17:37 A 90% institutional investor base and the three main credit risks
21:03 Fasanara Open Quant: solving the access problem
22:09 Eight years ahead in digital assets and tokenisation
Join Francesco Filia and Paolo Viale, and other senior members of Fasanara live at the interactive Opalesque INVESTOR WORKSHOP on October 29, 2026 www.opalesque.com/webinar.
This live session contains advanced concepts and is intended for sophisticated investors only. A user-friendly video replay will be provided. Past performance of any strategy discussed does not guarantee future results.
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"Diversification is not aspirational. It's hard work."
This Opalesque VIRTUAL MANAGER VISIT takes us to London's Soho district to meet Fasanara Capital. Over 15 years the firm has grown from a specialist in technology-enabled asset-based finance into a global alternative investment platform covering private credit, digital assets and quantitative trading.
Fasanara is now Europe's most granular home-grown multi-strategy platform, with around 200 independent alpha pods. Unlike its US peers, it did not raise a war chest to outbid them f ...more
