Suncorp chief executive John Mulcahy yesterday provided fresh insight into the finance and insurance group's funding strategy in recent months, including some details on the bank's reliance on private placements to raise wholesale funding.Speaking at an investor conference organised by Macquarie Group, Mulcahy said the bank was in the advanced stages of finalising documentation for a Samurai bond and said the bank expected to roadshow in Japan in June, and will presumably sell debt in that market soon after.He said that Suncorp recently reactivated a commercial paper facility in the US market and in the past fortnight raised US$400 million.He said that since January the bank sold debt through private placements of $1.6 billion in aggregate, with maturities ranging from 12 months to two years. The bank sold the debt to investors locally and in Asia and Europe, he said.Mulcahy said the combination of the private placements, term issuance, the planned Samurai bond and the imminent sale of preference shares would increase the average duration of liabilities to back over 0.4 months in coming months.He said Suncorp was also in the process of internally securitising $2.6 billion of mortgages that would qualify for repurchase agreements with the RBA.On the asset side Mulcahy said that about one third of lending in the business bank was on fixed rates, with funding costs hedged at the time of settlement, and the other two thirds subject to market review.He said he expected higher interest rates to cut lending growth through calendar 2008, but said he stuck by a projected increase in profit for Suncorp's banking business of between 10 and 12 per cent before bad and doubtful debts, "primarily due to cost restraint and above system growth in the first half of the year".Mulchay said Suncorp was likely "to experience significantly lower proportional bad debt write offs than our major competitors" in spite of historically higher levels of impaired assets, which he put down to a conservative approach.He noted that three quarters of impaired assets were in development finance but said that "we are very confident in our level of provisioning and the high levels of security we maintain over these loans".