Steve Duncan

Steve Duncan is an Associate Director of Investments at CPE Capital, the Sydney-based private capital manager formerly known as CHAMP Private Equity (rebranded to CPE Capital in 2019). He joined the firm in 2019, bringing more than twenty-five years of experience in accounting and finance. Within CPE he holds functional responsibility for deal-related finance and accounting activities, leading the financial due diligence on new platform deals and on bolt-on acquisitions for existing portfolio companies.

Before CPE Capital, Duncan spent roughly 15 years as a Transaction Services Partner at Deloitte, where he led the firm's national Private Equity Group — a role that placed him at the centre of financial and transaction diligence for private equity buyers in the Australian market. That background is directly reflected in his mandate at CPE, which is diligence- and transaction-finance oriented rather than deal-origination or capital-allocation.

On the education side, Duncan holds a degree in Economics from the University of Warwick (UK) and qualified as a Chartered Accountant in London in 1995. He is also a member of the Australian Institute of Chartered Accountants (Chartered Accountants Australia and New Zealand).

CPE Capital itself traces its lineage to 1987 and has deployed over A$4.5 billion across 86+ platform investments since inception. It runs a mid-market control-buyout strategy across Australasia; its recent vehicles include CPE Capital Fund 8 (2016 vintage, ~A$735m) and CPE Capital Fund 9 (2020 vintage, ~A$729m).

• Operates within CPE Capital's mid-market private equity strategy — control buyouts, founder partnerships and growth investments, not angel or seed cheques.
• Deal size: enterprises valued A$100m–A$750m, typically requiring A$50m+ of equity per transaction.
• Geography: businesses located in, or with a material part of their business plan centred on, Australia and New Zealand, including companies with offshore operations or expansion ambitions.
• Sectors where CPE has particular depth: education, healthcare, food & beverage, logistics, financial services, and niche manufacturing.
• Duncan's personal remit is the financial due-diligence and deal-accounting side of the investment process — assessing the quality of earnings, financial risk and integration/bolt-on economics — so his "yes" is grounded in verifiable financial performance and clean, defensible numbers rather than early-stage narrative.