Crescent Wealth is Australia’s first Islamically-compliant super fund, Crescent Finance is an Islamically-compliant lender, while the Crescent Foundation and Crescent Institute are not-for-profit organisations focused on community and refugee support and networking events respectively.

Ms Silva has more than 20 years’ experience managing large and geographically diverse teams, across multiple industries including pharmaceuticals, banking and agribusiness. As Deputy Managing Director her focus at Crescent will be holistic, she said.

“My ‘why’ is to be of service to others, and I am committed to being of service to everyone within the community. In my experience, for an organisation to be really great it needs to have balance between for profit and for the good of the community, and thanks to Crescent Wealth’s track record and investment in its not-for-profit entities, it is well placed to realise this.

“A key part of my role will involve refreshing the focus of the Group to ensure it continues to build and resonate with our growing community, while also providing clarity and differentiation in an increasingly competitive financial services sector,” she added.

Ms Silva has held a number of leadership roles including Acting CEO of TAFE South Australia, Chief Operating Officer for FleetPartners, a leading leasing and fleet management company across Australia and New Zealand, General Manager Commercial Operations at Elders, responsible for operations on a national level and prior to that held a number of roles with the ANZ Banking Group.

She has extensive board and committee experience including being Chair of InTouch Multicultural Centre Against Family Violence, Chair of Contemporary Arts Precincts, Director of AMES Australia, the South Australia Film Corporation and the Malek Fahd Islamic School.

In 2022, Ms Silva was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) and has previously been named as one of Australia’s inaugural 100 Women of Influence in the Westpac/AFR Awards.

Crescent Wealth Founder & Managing Director Talal Yassine OAM said Ms Silva’s appointment was a significant milestone for the Group as it builds solid capabilities to rapidly build scale, take market share and have a much stronger community impact over the next five years.

“As a well-respected business and community heart leader with a tremendous ability to empathise and articulate a compelling vision that others will follow, Miriam is the perfect person to help the Crescent group of companies achieve its wide-ranging goals.

“She is equally at home discussing balance sheets as she is talking about cultural capital and cross-cultural relations, whether in the boardroom or community hall. I look forward to the enormous contribution she will make,” Mr Yassine said.

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Mas Harris

Australia’s first Islamic compliant super fund, Crescent Wealth, has diversified its socially and environmentally responsible investment options by providing members with access to investments in Australian water rights.

Crescent Wealth Head of Investments Mas Harris said water rights, which provides the agricultural sector the right to access a certain volume of water in a year, were a great fit for Crescent’s principles and its range of alternative investment options.

“In Australia, water rights are freely traded in an open market with the twin objectives of ensuring economically efficient water use and environmental sustainability. The market is well established and regulated which gives us assurance as investors that we are entering a market with good governance, stability and transparency.

“Australia is one of the driest continents in the world in terms of water assets and we see this as a great potential investment over the longer term as the market develops and matures further.”

Mr Harris added that water right investment would be a particularly attractive option for members who wanted to reduce volatility in their portfolios because returns were uncorrelated to traditional asset classes.

Crescent Wealth is able to invest in water rights through funds managed by Riparian Capital Partners. Riparian invests in perpetual water right entitlements and is then able to sell or lease annual water allocations available under these entitlements. These can vary each year in response to factors such as storage levels in reservoirs and climate conditions.

The vast majority of water rights traded in Australia are located in the Murray-Darling Basin area which contains approximately 66 percent of Australia’s irrigated farmland. Since 2008, water rights have generated an average yield of above 4 percent*.

Riparian Capital Partners Managing Partner, Nick Waters, said the major long-term drivers of water entitlement value were factors that influenced irrigators’ capacity to pay for water.

“These include productivity gains farmers are able to achieve on their operations and through moves to higher value cropping systems which enable farms to produce more value per megalitre of water.

“We are also seeing some pretty clear long term trends playing out around climate change with lower rainfall patterns and higher temperatures which are relatively supportive of water values going forward,” Mr Waters said.

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As Chief Operating Officer and Head of Marketing & Growth, Rachel will lead and manage the strategic and operational growth remit that includes customer and digital engagement for the Crescent group of companies, including, Crescent Wealth, Crescent Finance, Crescent Foundation and the Crescent Institute.

Crescent Wealth is Australia’s first Islamically-compliant super fund. Rachel’s experience includes launching Islamic Banking and financial service products in the Middle East and South Asia where she drove financial empowerment strategies throughout the region.

In Australia and New Zealand, she has led the development and roll-out of marketing and communication strategies for BT Financial Group and JP Morgan, experience that will help Crescent’s growth aspirations as it looks to build out its suite of brands to realise a ‘one ethos many brands’ approach to serving Crescent’s customers and stakeholders.

Crescent Wealth Founder and Managing Director Talal Yassine OAM said the appointment was part of a strategic push by the group to rapidly build scale and increase assets under management to $5bn over the next five years.

“As a marketing and operations leader and with a background in law, Rachel has an in-depth knowledge of the Australian and global financial services ecosystem. Her focus is on ‘putting the customer first in everything we do’, which will include an innovative approach to customer service and relationship management across the Crescent group of companies.

“Beyond investing in industries and companies that comply with Islamic investment guidelines, Crescent is passionate about bringing positive change to the Australian community through support for not for profit initiatives. Rachel will also play a key role in this facet of our business,” Mr Yassine said.

Rachel holds a Bachelor of Laws (LLB Hons) from the University of South Wales and is RG 146 accredited.

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Jason Hazell

The Australian Government should introduce a 30-to-50 year government guaranteed infrastructure bond to rebuild the Australian economy and develop much needed infrastructure, Crescent Wealth Board Director and former Liberal Party leader Dr John Hewson AM said last Friday.

Speaking alongside Crescent Wealth’s Chief Investment Officer, Jason Hazell, he called for support to let super funds get on with the job of generating investment returns for members and for the government to drive long term sustainable assets classes for funds to invest in.

Dr Hewson told Crescent Wealth members during a webinar today that there was growing recognition that Australia needed to be doing more to ensure it had the infrastructure in place for its growing population and to support desperately needed economic growth.

“Introducing a long-term infrastructure bond with a government guaranteed coupon would be an attractive fixed income investment for Australian super funds who collectively hold almost $3 trillion in capital, as well as many large overseas investors.

“After steering Australia successfully through our most serious health crisis in a century, the National Cabinet faces the daunting challenge of creating jobs and getting Australia back to work – issuing a government bond to generate billions of dollars of needed investment in value-add projects would help fast track this.

“Such a fund would need to be independently managed and have high levels of governance. A way would also have to be developed to complete a detailed cost-benefit analysis of each project that also assigned a value to projects that helped reduce carbon emissions and climate change risk so proposed infrastructure projects could be properly ranked for priority.

“Without such a fund and ranking system many needed large infrastructure projects will not be possible. For example, it is simply ridiculous that we are building a new international airport at Badgerys Creek in Western Sydney and there is no plan for a dedicated train line to Sydney City.

“We have to be doing more than we are doing and do it in a commercially sensible way,” Dr Hewson said.

Crescent Wealth’s leadership is committed to open and transparent communication with its members holding regular webinars to address the economic impact on COVID-19 generally, and the performance of Crescent Wealth’s investments specifically.

Jason Hazell, called for the government and industry to take a leadership position in developing innovative investment vehicles that help rebuild the Australian economy and which are aligned with the objectives of the superannuation system, which is to provide income in retirement for Australians.

“Superannuation is a significant national asset.  It should be protected to provide for the retirement of all Australians.  Our focus at Crescent Wealth is on delivering returns for members through ethical and sustainable investment. The greatest opportunity for our nearly $3 trillion superannuation system is to align economy building investment opportunities with the objectives of the superannuation system. This will serve the long term national interest. An infrastructure bond would be a great first step,” said Hazell.

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Jason Hazell

Socially responsible Australian superannuation fund Crescent Wealth has appointed experienced investment professional Jason Hazell as its Chief Investment Officer.

Mr Hazell has more than 20 years’ experience in superannuation, investment management, mergers and acquisitions and private equity. He has joined Crescent Wealth from Nightingale Partners, a Sydney-based venture capital firm that invests in early and growth stage companies.

Prior to this, Mr Hazell spent more than eight years with NAB Asset Management where he was Head of Investment Specialists and previously Head of Strategy and M&A. He also had a 10-year stint with MLC Investment Management, managing Australian and global real estate portfolios.

In his new role with Crescent Wealth Mr Hazell works closely with the investment committee to set investment objectives, formulate investment strategies and manage portfolios that invest in ethical and Islamic compliant industries.

He holds a Bachelor of Science (Mathematics) from the University of Sydney and a Master of Finance from the University of New South Wales.

Crescent Wealth Managing Director Talal Yassine OAM said that prior to joining Crescent as CIO, Mr Hazell had been a member of the firm’s investment committee. Because of this, he knew Crescent and its distinctive investment approach well.

“Jason is a proven performer, a great addition to the Crescent Wealth family, and a strong supporter of our investment ethos.

“Our socially responsible investment principles and values align with low risk and medium returns over long periods. Our Islamic compliant investment approach also means we actively have a ‘no-go’ approach to investments in industries such as weapons manufacturing, alcohol production and sales, tobacco, gambling, pornography and interest-earning financial institutions, such as banks.

“We offer an attractive alternative based on socially responsible investing and place funds in healthcare, property and infrastructure, utilities, manufacturing and innovative industries instead,” Mr Yassine added.

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Talal Yassine

Prominent businessman and academic Talal Yassine OAM has called on the Federal Government to break Australia’s cycle of underinvestment in infrastructure by underwriting local superannuation fund investment in needed infrastructure assets and using Islamic financing.

Mr Yassine, who is managing director of Crescent Wealth and has served on the boards of Australia Post, Sydney Ports and Macquarie University, said the lack of investment in infrastructure was nothing less than ‘intergenerational theft’ at a time when Australia was wealthier than at any point in its history.

Speaking at the National Infrastructure Summit in Sydney today, Mr Yassine said close to a trillion dollars of additional infrastructure investment was needed to ‘future proof’ Australia’s economic growth trajectory and quality of life for future generations.

“However, while this asset-rich, infrastructure-poor reality is becoming increasingly well-known, solutions seem too hard for the nation’s leaders to apply. This can’t be allowed to continue. It is not enough to simply be the ‘lucky country’. We need to think, plan and invest now to maintain our standards and grow into the forward-thinking nation that we all want to be a part of,” he told conference attendees.

The superannuation and Islamic finance solutions

Mr Yassine said one obvious solution was to encourage and incentivise the managers of Australia’s rapidly growing $2.5 trillion superannuation stockpile to invest in Australian infrastructure rather than send large amounts overseas to support the infrastructure needs of other nations. Currently many fund managers believed they could get better returns from lower risk infrastructure investments overseas and felt compelled to chase these because Australian law required them to invest in fund member’s ‘best interests’ which they interpret as financial. However, there were simple fixes for these issues, Mr Yassine said.

“The first would be to set up a hybrid public-private limited partnership structure under which the Federal Government could provide seed funding and use its large reserves to underwrite guaranteed minimum returns for necessary infrastructure projects, while the superannuation funds would syndicate the investments to their members.

“Member investors and all Australians would benefit now and well into the future from the government and superannuation funds taking the risks that each is best placed to take for the national good.

“It would be a relatively quick fix to amend the legislative covenant requiring superfunds to act in member’s ‘best interests’ to also include investing in projects that support Australia’s economic wellbeing. Isn’t improved infrastructure also in the best interests of superannuation fund beneficiaries?” he asked.

Islamic finance investment as a serious option

My Yassine said another source of funding for Australian infrastructure was the growing regional and global Islamic finance market. “If Australia’s burgeoning superannuation industry cannot or will not invest in infrastructure for Australia’s future, Islamic finance investment should be seriously considered.

“Islamic investment principles and values align with low risk-medium returns over the long period and with Islamic banking assets expected to reach about US$3.4 trillion globally this year, Islamic finance has the scale to be a real alternative. Only a very small fraction of this would be needed to provide Australian infrastructure with the lifeblood it needs,” he said.

“Australians who think it may be hard to source Islamic debt need only look at the United Kingdom, which in 2014 became the first Western country to issue an Islamic bond, otherwise known as a sukuk. This five-year sukuk raised GBP£200 million and was 10 times oversubscribed, with investor demand exceeding GBP£2.3 billion.

“The Australian Government is equally well placed, and possibly even better placed by geography, to issue sukuks to assist in the funding of our infrastructure. Local financial institutions, such as National Australia Bank and Crescent Wealth have expertise in building compliant Islamic debt structures, and could be used in these funding initiatives,” Mr Yassine said.

“It is also worth noting that our relatively close neighbour, Malaysia has been using the sukuk market to support its infrastructure push for a prolonged period. Malaysian data suggests that up to 60% of the US$31 billion raised via debt from Malaysia and other Southeast Asian countries last year came through the Islamic finance market,” he added.

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