Hello everyone,

I am glad to announce that we’ve finalized the program for our upcoming Structured Products on Digital Assets Summit.

The last piece has been the addition of a session with STS Digital on Wednesday, September 9, covering institutional demand from the trading desk and a deep dive into how the products themselves are built.

STS is a good partner of ours specializing in market making in options and structured products on digital assets. We’ll have both Co-Founder and CEO Maxime Seiler on to talk about what institutional demand for these products actually looks like from a trading desk, and Jeremy Dominh, Head of Structured Products and QIS, to talk about how the products themselves get built, walking through two we’ve done together on Bitcoin.

This rounds out our full program. Below I’ve put the details. If you haven’t yet, be sure to sign up for one or more.

• GenTwo provides the securitization infrastructure to design, create, and scale investment products on any asset - quickly, flexibly, and off-balance sheet. Learn more by downloading the Assetization Playbook or booking a call.

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Below is the full program. You can register here: gentwo.com/digital-assets-summit/

• Monday, September 7, 14:00 CET – Structured Products on Digital Assets: Understanding the Opportunity: I talk with GenTwo Founder and Chairman Patrick Loepfe about the structured products market, and Florian Marty, who heads GenTwo Digital, will show why there is a gap when it comes to digital assets, and what banks and asset managers need to know if they want to fill it.

• Tuesday, September 8, 10:00 CET – Infrastructure: Connecting Digital Assets to the Banking System: Next I talk to Roman Wildhaber of Bank Frick, one of the earliest banks to work with digital assets, about everything a digital asset product needs to function end to end, from custody and paying agent to fiat settlement, using the bank’s xPULSE network as the concrete example.

• Tuesday, September 8, 14:00 CET – The Supply Gap: A Look at the Structured Products on Digital Assets Market: Florian joins again for a more detailed structured products market overview, followed by a discussion with Gabriele Gentile, Managing Director of Capital Finance & Bravo Company, about what clients want and what they still cannot get in this market.

• Wednesday, September 9, 14:00 CET – Tokenization and Structured Products: A Practitioner’s View: In this session I am joined by Nick Cogswell of Archax, the UK’s first regulated exchange, broker, and custodian for digital assets, to take a deep dive into tokenization today. We cover what tokenization actually is, what it takes to tokenize a product, and what makes sense to tokenize today and where things are going in the future.

• Wednesday, September 9, 16:30 CET – Market Making: Institutional Demand and Product Construction: In this one Maxime Seiler (CEO) and Jeremy Dominh (Head of Structured Products) of STS Digital give us the view from the desk that prices and hedges these structures, and then we take a look under the hood of two Bitcoin products built with GenTwo to show how each one works.

• Thursday, September 10, 09:00 CET – Case Study: A Bitcoin Structured Product in Practice: Continuing our look under the hood, I am joined by Wei Nee Chew and Damien Loh of Ericsenz Capital to tell the story of a Bitcoin Dual-Currency Note they designed, issued, ran, and are continuing with.

If you are interested in where structured products and digital assets actually meet, this is the week to tune in. Looking forward to seeing you!

Tom

Hello everyone,

In this edition of The Assetizer, I am talking with Florian Marty, who recently joined us as Managing Director of GenTwo Digital. That makes him responsible for our digital assets business.

He is also working with me to put together our upcoming Structured Products on Digital Assets Summit. (You can learn more about that here, and sign up here.)

From robots to reverse convertibles

Florian joined us from Bank Vontobel, where he led the bank’s DLT and crypto initiatives. Before that he was heavily involved in Deritrade, Vontobel’s structured products platform, which was invented by GenTwo co-founder Patrick Loepfe. (You can listen to my podcast with Patrick here.) Earlier in his career he was at Boston Consulting Group. He also, I discovered when reading his bio, holds a master’s in Micro Technology. That means that, alongside being an expert in finance, he knows how to build robots.

One of the first things Florian did after arriving was write our Structured Products on Digital Assets report, which you can find here and which I wrote about in The Assetizer here. In it, he sets out the investment case for digital assets and the barriers still standing in the way of full institutional adoption. That seemed like a good place to start.

• GenTwo provides the securitization infrastructure to design, create, and scale investment products on any asset - quickly, flexibly, and off-balance sheet. Learn more by downloading the Assetization Playbook or booking a call.

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Winter garden

Florian, the big story in crypto over the past two years has been mainstream adoption and regulatory clarity. But digital assets continue to be their usual volatile selves. For someone looking back over the past twelve months and seeing Bitcoin down almost 30%, what do you say about the market?

I’d say look what is happening away from the price. While bitcoin ETFs saw heavy redemptions in this latest crypto winter, cumulative net inflows have remained positive, bitcoin holdings in the ETFs remained near their peaks in coin terms, and corporate treasuries kept buying. So while tactical money may have left, long-term allocators have stayed. And more than 70% of institutional investors say they plan to increase digital asset allocations in 2026.

We see the same thing in our own business, where the appetite is strongest among wealth managers, family offices, and others sitting close to end clients. The problem, which we discuss in the white paper, is that there is a gap in the crypto product offering for investors who are not crypto natives. We still need to bridge the last mile to real adoption. That is one of the things I am trying to help with in my role at GenTwo.

So what is getting in the way? What do we need to cross that last mile?

In a word, risk management. Right now the only way to access crypto without owning coins directly is through products like ETFs, and that is raw spot exposure. It is not what sophisticated investors are looking for. They want the full palette of risk-management tools they are used to in traditional finance. That means structured products with asymmetric payoffs, which in plain terms are instruments with clearly defined outcomes based on clearly defined conditions. They can for example deliver yield in flat markets, downside protection in volatile ones, and ways to express a view on a market without holding the coins.

What’s in the box

What would such products look like? Do you have any examples?

In the white paper I set out four common structured product types that suit crypto particularly well.

There are capital protected notes, where an investor participates in the upside of a digital asset while all or most of the principal is protected at maturity. That is a good choice for someone cautious about the market or allocating for the first time.

There are dual currency notes, where the investor receives an enhanced coupon in exchange for the possibility of redemption in a second currency or asset at a pre-agreed rate. That suits treasuries and yield-seeking allocators, and in practice anyone who has already decided the level at which they would buy or sell.

Then there are barrier reverse convertibles, which pay a fixed coupon and return full principal provided the underlying stays above a defined barrier. If it breaches, the investor takes delivery of the asset. This can be used to monetize crypto volatility directly.

And there are also discount certificates, where an investor buys exposure to a crypto asset at a discount to its current price in exchange for a cap on the upside. This can be appealing to those with a neutral to moderately bullish view.

This all sounds very theoretical. Do such products already exist? Can you give some concrete examples?

Sure. We are about to launch two new products with a partner of ours that are illustrative. Both are on Bitcoin.

The first is a barrier reverse convertible. The term is three months and it pays a fixed coupon of 20% per annum, which the investor receives whatever happens. What they accept in return is a level on the downside. If Bitcoin has fallen past it at maturity, they take that fall. If it has not, they get their money back plus the coupon.

The second is a capital protected note. Here the term is nine months and there is no coupon, but the investor gets a floor. Whatever happens to Bitcoin, they get most of their money back. In exchange they take part of the upside rather than all of it.

These are just two of a number of examples I could have named. The important thing is that such types of products are becoming more common in the digital assets space. And that I think is a very good sign.

That may be a good sign, but in the white paper you are very clear that there is a large gap in the market right now. So why haven’t we seen more of this?

Because there are still some constraints on the supply side.

Take banks, the traditional manufacturers of structured products. In Europe, the Basel rules impose onerous capital requirements on crypto holdings, with risk weightings as high as 1250%. That makes issuing these products uneconomical.

For an asset manager the obstacle is different. What is missing is a straightforward way to package a sophisticated crypto strategy into something clients can actually buy.

As we write in the white paper, asymmetric structured products like those I described, as well as instruments like AMCs, can be used to help get over these hurdles. This is where the future of this market lies. And it’s what we are working on at GenTwo.

Last question: you and I are gearing up for our Structured Products on Digital Assets Summit in September. Why should Assetizer readers sign up?

In a word: depth. Our program is filled with practitioners who will really dig into the details of how such products get made, how the market for such products works, the real state of tokenization, just a lot of interesting subjects. It’s definitely geared for those who want to see how this works from the inside.

All the best,
Tom

Attend the GenTwo Structured Products on Digital Assets Summit

Join us September 7 to 11 for a five-day online summit bringing together leading experts from across the digital asset ecosystem. Sessions cover market structure, institutional investment solutions, tokenization, and how these products actually get built. Attend individual sessions or register for the full Summit, live or on demand.

Register here.

Rolling hills, splendid lakes, breathtaking mountain views, historic city centers: this is the backdrop for Swiss residential real estate, one of the most attractive and highly priced real estate markets in the world.

But not all is well in the alpine paradise. Despite strong demand, Switzerland isn’t building enough. Only around 42,000 new flats went up in 2025, against the 50,000 the Federal Office for Housing says are needed, and the vacancy rate has slipped below 1%, the level the Federal Office defines as a shortage. And even the capital that is flowing is going to the wrong place: the Federal Office notes that investors are concentrating on replacement builds and renovations, which keep the construction industry busy but do little to expand the housing stock. Getting more built means getting capital to the projects that actually add supply, and that is fundamentally a financing question. (For more see the sources at the bottom of the post.)

Recently, we launched a new Swiss real estate product line that, among other things, will provide builders and investors new tools that should help address this issue. Doing that involved a number of innovations that make this in my opinion an excellent example of assetization in action. So I thought it worth a post.

To get more information, I sat down with my colleague Moritz Dörig. As Head of Sales Switzerland Moritz has been intimately involved in developing the new offering. Read on to find out what I learned.

• More on the GenTwo Real Estate Offering here: gentwo.com/real-estate/

• GenTwo provides the securitization infrastructure to design, create, and scale investment products on any asset - quickly, flexibly, and off-balance sheet. Learn more by downloading the Assetization Playbook or booking a call.

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As we wrote in our book Assetization, the pattern repeats across the developed world. For most of the post-war era, the things society needs built were paid for by the state. That model is breaking down: public balance sheets are stretched, and banks, constrained by tighter capital rules, have pulled back from exactly the kind of lending that gets projects off the ground.

The result is a vast shortfall. By one estimate, as we cite in the book, the world needs to invest some $94 trillion in infrastructure by 2040 and will fall short by around $15 trillion. That will require private investment. Infrastructure is quietly shifting from a public good funded by taxes to an investable asset class funded by private capital, but the money only flows if the right instruments exist to carry it.

In Switzerland, the hope is that by making it easier to bring private capital to where it is needed, products like this one from GenTwo can benefit builders, investors and ultimately everyone in the country looking for affordable places to live.

All the best,
Tom

Sources:

• Switzerland’s housing shortage: how bad is it? (Swissinfo, English)

• Verknappung am Wohnungsmarkt hält an (Swiss Federal Office for Housing, German)

• Aktionsplan Wohnungsknappheit wirkt (Swiss Contractors’ Association, German)

Despite the recent crypto winter, data shows that institutional money remains dedicated to the asset class. Yet as we wrote in our recent whitepaper, the way in is still basically ETFs and spot.

That leaves a big gap for professional investors: tools that let you for example define risk or yield in ways that are standard for traditional assets. In other words, crypto is lacking structured products.

The good news is that this is changing. And if you’d be interested in seeing exactly how, then I invite you to join us for Structured Products on Digital Assets Summit from September 7-11. As with our AMC Summit, I will be moderating all the sessions. For anyone who follows this space, I think we have some genuinely good content in store.

• Explore and Register for the Summit

• GenTwo provides the securitization infrastructure to design, create, and scale investment products on any asset - quickly, flexibly, and off-balance sheet. Learn more by downloading the Assetization Playbook or booking a call.

Subscribe now

What you can expect

This weeklong program of webinars picks up where our whitepaper left off: with practitioners from our ecosystem (and beyond) who can dive into the details of how the digital asset structured product market works and where it is going.

We are covering the market itself, the traditional/digital asset infrastructure interface, tokenization, trading, and more. And we also feature case studies of live products.

Here is the program so far:

• Opportunity: The week opens with the big picture. Patrick Loepfe, who helped industrialize Switzerland’s structured products market before co-founding GenTwo, sets digital assets in the long story of how any asset becomes bankable in the first place. Florian Marty, who wrote the whitepaper, then makes the specific case: where the demand actually is, why banks and asset managers struggle to meet it, and the issuance model that changes that.

• Infrastructure: From there we get into the plumbing. Most crypto infrastructure was built to route around banks. Structured products can’t. They need custody, a paying agent, NAV, clearing, fiat settlement, all under a regulated roof. Roman Wildhaber of Bank Frick walks through that stack, using the bank’s xPULSE settlement network as a concrete example of what it actually takes to connect a digital asset product to the banking system end to end.

• Market: Then the demand side. There’s broad agreement that client interest is real. It’s much less clear the products to serve it exist yet. I’ll be sitting down with Gabriele Gentile of Capital Finance & Bravo Company, who fields these client requests directly, to talk through what people are asking for and what they still can’t get. This is the session that measures the gap the rest of the week is trying to close.

• Tokenization: Midweek we take on tokenization, one of the most talked-about and least understood ideas in finance. Nick Cogswell, Head of Institutional Partnerships at Archax, the UK’s first regulated exchange, broker and custodian for digital assets, walks us through what tokenization actually is, what’s genuinely possible today versus what’s still years off, and what it takes to tokenize a product.

• Case Study: And then we get to something rare in these conversations: a product that actually exists. Damien Loh, CIO of Ericsenz Capital, joins me to walk through a Bitcoin structured note they designed, issued, and ran through its full lifecycle, coupon and all. Most talk about structured products on digital assets is theoretical. This one traded.

I expect 2-3 additional sessions will be added, so be sure to go back to the website to check.

Once the program is finalized I will drop you all another note.

Looking forward to (virtually) seeing you there!

All the best,
Tom

(And in case you missed it, here’s the registration link yet again: Explore and Register for the Summit)

Hello everyone,

As the second season of The Assetizer approaches the midway point, your humble correspondent’s thoughts are turning to sun-drenched beaches, cool drinks and lazing in the shade with a good book. In other words, The Assetizer is taking a wee summer break. We’ll return on August 13.

In the meantime I took the occasion to review our themes and content over the first half of 2026. You’ll find the summary below, plus a lot of links. If you want to catch up, or are looking for some summer reading for yourself, feel free to dive in.

I also have an exclusive announcement for Assetizer readers (see below).

Lastly, if you have any comments, thoughts or suggestions, as always, give us a shout at assetizer@gentwo.com.

• GenTwo provides the securitization infrastructure to design, create, and scale investment products on any asset - quickly, flexibly, and off-balance sheet. Learn more by downloading the Assetization Playbook or booking a call.

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Asset Evolution: Digital Assets, Private Markets and a Look at the Frontier

Last year Digital assets were a big theme at The Assetizer, and over the past few weeks it’s made a comeback.

This isn’t by accident. I can announce here for the first time that we are hosting a Structured Products on digital Assets Summit from September 7-11 online. More on our website.

At the Assetizer we’ve been quietly setting the scene a bit already:

• The Case of the Missing (Structured) Products

• Asset Classes Aren’t Born, They’re Wrapped

We also took a look at some other classes on the asset frontier:

• You Are Probably Missing Private Tech: A Conversation with Andreas Bezner

• Why Nimble Wins in Private Markets

• How to Boost Fund Distribution with Tracker Certificates

• Investing in Guessing: Are Prediction Markets an Emerging Asset Class?

Innovation Lab: I Want My AMC

As always, we spent some time looking under the hood of innovations in our space. The main theme was AMCs, which were the subject of our first Summit last April. Here’s the coverage, including our comprehensive AMC report:

• Summit Report: Modern Perspectives on AMCs

• Why AMCs May Be the World’s Most Flexible Wrapper: Learnings from the Second Half of the AMC Summit

• Waves, Wrappers and What’s Next: AMC Summit at the Halfway Point

We had some AMC coverage coming out of other events as well:

• Why AMC Adoption Is Growing: View from SRP Europe

• Expert Advice on AMCs: The View from Finanz26

And there were some other topics on the innovation agenda too:

• Financial Engineering as a Service: New Report from GenTwo

• Podcast: AI in Asset Management — Lessons from a 30-Year Veteran

• Infrastructure, Access and Surviving AI: Takeaways

Future of Finance: The Assetization Bible

As readers will know, we published the second edition of our book “Assetization” with Wiley this spring. It lays out our updated thinking on the future of the investment industry infrastructure and with it investing as a whole. I took the occasion to do a series of summaries. A bit like Tom’s CliffsNotes:

• How Buy-Side Discontent Is Reshaping Investment Industry Infrastructure

• Wave 1: How the Investment Industry Became a Buyer’s Market

• Wave 2: The Containerization of Finance

• Wave 3: The Radical Automation of the Investment Industry

• How to Move from Curator to Creator

• Untapped Assets: The Trillion-Dollar Opportunity of Assetization

• Assetization and the History of Finance

• Invest in Your Beliefs: The End Game of Assetization

Looking Ahead with Hindsight

The year started with our look ahead. We’ll recap at year’s end to see where we landed, but for now, here is where we started:

• Six Hard Questions for 2026

See you in three weeks,
Tom

I first met Andreas Bezner in February 2025 when he was a panelist at a GenTwo private markets event I moderated. We have kept in touch since, and he joined us more recently for a webinar on making private markets bankable.

As co-founder and CEO of Stableton, one of our longest-standing clients at GenTwo, he has been as close to the private markets space as anyone I know. Stableton is a Zurich-based, FINMA-regulated asset manager with a passive, index-based strategy giving investors systematic access to the 20 most valuable privately held technology companies in the world.

The most valuable technology companies are increasingly choosing to stay private longer, which means that is increasingly where the real value creation is happening. Stableton is one of the clearest proof points of that argument, and I sat down with Andreas recently to understand how he got here, what the company actually does, and why it might matter for how we all think about private markets.

• More on Stableton: www.stableton.com.

• GenTwo provides the securitization infrastructure to design, create, and scale investment products on any asset - quickly, flexibly, and off-balance sheet. Learn more by downloading the Assetization Playbook or booking a call.

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The Long Road to an Obvious Idea

Bezner did not arrive at private markets through the usual route. His first professional steps were in an Ernst & Young office full of folders, poring over transaction documents late into the night. The work was private equity due diligence: modeling, valuations, traditional buyouts, carve-outs, cost efficiencies, financial structuring. “The playbook was to optimize operations, apply leverage, and drive incremental growth,” he recalls.

He grew increasingly dissatisfied. “Private equity was unlocking value by financial engineering and reshuffling existing assets rather than backing innovation,” he says. The question he kept returning to was where the real wealth creation was actually happening. The answer seemed obvious. The most valuable companies in the world were all technology companies, compounding for years through continuous disruption. By the time public investors could participate, most of the value creation was already done.

“Private equity was unlocking value by financial engineering rather than backing innovation.”

He left to found his own hedge fund, a long-short equity strategy with a technology focus that he ran for several years. The fund, he says, performed exceptionally well throughout the Great Financial Crisis, but the experience taught him something he has carried with him ever since.

“The biggest lesson was to step off the hamster wheel of trading and let great companies compound your money over long periods of time,” he says. After selling his stake in the hedge fund company he co-founded, he spent years working with wealth managers and family offices and helping alternative asset managers establish themselves in the wealth channel. He kept seeing the same problem. Private investments and the wealth channel were, in his words, like mixing oil and water. Complex structures, high minimums, long lock-ups: none of it worked for the private wealth channel.

Meanwhile, as a graduate student in 2003, Bezner had written his master’s thesis on the secondary market for private equity, at a time when secondaries were barely a recognized asset class.

That insight stayed with him. What he had identified was a fundamental gap: private markets had no real liquidity mechanism. Investors could put money in, but getting it out was almost impossible without an IPO or a buyout. As companies began staying private for longer, that gap could only grow. He was convinced the secondary market would eventually become essential.

By the time he co-founded Stableton in 2018, all of those threads had converged. The thesis was ready to become a business.

Building Stableton

The founding idea, as Bezner describes it, was to build a bridge between private markets and the investors who had been locked out of them. The existing products were not built for the wealth channel. Even within the industry, private markets were stuck in an outdated mode of operating: ad hoc decision-making, relationship-driven sourcing, manual processes, and no systematic approach or data infrastructure.

“I wanted a tech- and data-driven asset manager,” he says, “one that could move at the pace this market actually demands.” He calls what they built an operating system for private markets.

That vision eventually crystallized into the Stableton Morningstar PitchBook Unicorn 20 strategy: the 20 most valuable private blue-chip technology companies, in one portfolio, through an index-based approach. Most of the industry, he notes with evident satisfaction, said it could not work. Today the company has completed over 175 transactions, holds close to $1 billion in assets under management, and sits as an institutional investor on the cap tables of more than 30 leading unicorns.

Bezner likes to describe Stableton as the Vanguard of growth equity, and the parallel is more than rhetorical. John Bogle launched the first index mutual fund with $11 million in assets and most of the industry told him it was a bad idea. His low-cost, client-first approach eventually reshaped public markets entirely.

“What Bogle did for public markets is what we are doing for the private market,” says Bezner. “He took an asset class dominated by expensive, actively managed funds and made it accessible through a low-cost, systematic, index-based approach. We are doing exactly the same thing, just in private markets.”

“What Vanguard did for public markets is what we are doing for the private market.”

This raises an obvious question. How do you build a rules-based index in a market with no exchange, no continuous price feed, and no shared governance framework?

The answer starts with the right partner. Stableton’s strategy is built around the Morningstar PitchBook Unicorn 20 Index, co-developed with Morningstar, which brings what Bezner describes as public-market-grade governance, methodology, and compliance to a market that has historically lacked all three.

The universe is defined by Morningstar and PitchBook data: the 20 most valuable privately held technology companies in developed markets with liquid secondary markets. The weighting is equal across all 20 companies. Pricing is handled by Morningstar’s proprietary mark-to-market model, drawing on data from specialized secondary market providers, and now covering more than 1,750 unicorns. Reconstitutions happen on a regular schedule, when companies IPO or new leaders emerge, with no discretionary manager judgment involved.

The shares themselves come from the direct secondary market: founders, early employees, and early investors looking for liquidity before an IPO. Stableton’s position on the cap tables of leading unicorns is what makes sourcing possible at scale.

“That gives us access, allocations, and insight that most investors simply cannot get,” Bezner says. The fund is semi-liquid: monthly subscriptions, quarterly redemptions at net asset value. That is a meaningful change from the decade-long lock-ups of traditional private equity.

Where the Real Value Lies

In 1999, the average technology company went public after four years. By 2024, that number had reached 13.5 years. Companies are staying private nearly three times longer than they did a generation ago, which means that roughly a decade of growth that used to happen inside public portfolios now happens entirely in private markets.

The scale of what is being missed is larger than most investors assume. According to Forge data, unicorns going public between 2019 and 2025 appreciated at a median annual rate of 65.7% between reaching a billion-dollar valuation and their IPO. The 20 most valuable private technology companies are today larger than the bottom 155 companies in the S&P 500, and 17 of those 20 would qualify for the Nasdaq 100 if they were public.

“If you are sitting in a private bank or family office today,” says Bezner, “you are probably missing something.”

“By the time a company like OpenAI or Anthropic goes public the majority of the growth will already be behind it.”

The traditional portfolio model was designed for an era when allocating to private markets at scale was not possible. That era is over. Public and private markets are converging into a spectrum, and where an investor sits on that spectrum is now a deliberate choice.

Nowhere is this more striking than in artificial intelligence. AI now accounts for nearly two-thirds of all primary deal value in 2025. Series B AI startups are trading at a median 2.1 times valuation step-up, compared to 1.4 times for non-AI companies at the same stage. A few years ago, Bezner observes, AI was a sub-sector. Today it sets the benchmark for late-stage private technology pricing. OpenAI and Anthropic are operating at a scale that would place them among the largest public technology companies in the world. They are not listed on any exchange.

“By the time a company like OpenAI or Anthropic goes public,” he says, “the majority of the growth will already be behind it. If your AI exposure is only through public companies, you are capturing the second half of the story at best.”

The Wrapper

This is where GenTwo enters the picture. Stableton distributes its strategy through Actively Managed Certificates, a product structure with a Swiss ISIN that can be held, traded, and reported through standard brokerage and banking systems. Traditional private equity vehicles require subscription documents, capital call schedules, and minimums that typically start at $100,000. An AMC trades through a standard brokerage account, which changes the distribution calculus entirely. The fund charges no performance fees, in contrast to the traditional “2 and 20” fee model that combines an annual management fee with a performance fee on gains. The regulatory structure is clean: Swiss ISIN, FINMA-regulated, with a Luxembourg-based SICAV-RAIF available for international investors.

The distribution story has two channels. The institutional side now encompasses more than 150 banks, wealth managers, family offices, and institutional investors. The retail channel is where the story becomes genuinely interesting. Swissquote, one of Switzerland’s largest online banks and another close partner of GenTwo, is Stableton’s exclusive retail partner in the country. Through Swissquote, private investors can access the Unicorn 20 AMC with a minimum investment of $200 and a flat transaction fee of $9. “The same platform you use to buy ETFs,” Bezner says, “now gives you exposure to the 20 most valuable private technology companies in the world.” He is not wrong.

“The same platform you use to buy ETFs now gives you exposure to the 20 most valuable private technology companies in the world.”

The Long Game

Five years from now, Bezner wants Stableton to sit alongside public equity in every serious portfolio as the default allocation for private blue-chip technology. The secondary market is already pointing in that direction. Transaction volume is growing 41% year on year, secondaries now rival IPO and M&A as an exit channel, and the overall market stands at roughly $162 billion, with direct secondaries alone reaching around $80 billion in 2025. That is a market that barely existed as a recognized category when a young graduate student in Switzerland wrote a thesis on it in 2003 and received good marks, and nothing more.

The 23-year gap between the insight and the vindication is, in its own way, the most compelling thing about the Stableton story.

All the best,
Tom

One of the oldest questions in the crypto community is when will digital assets go “mainstream” and how will we know when they do.

A lot of people might say that it’s already happened: that with the BlackRock ETF and the change of regulatory heart in the US we’ve experienced the moment when crypto came in from the cold.

As my colleague Florian Marty, who recently came over to us from Bank Vontobel to run our digital assets business, argues in a new GenTwo whitepaper, the reality is that we’re not quite there yet.

The problem isn’t demand. Despite the latest crypto winter, institutional demand remains high. The problem is supply. Not of digital assets necessarily, but of digital asset products of the type investors really want. It’s only when we can fill this gap that we can really talk about mainstreaming or institutionalization of digital assets.

Let’s take a look.

• GenTwo provides the securitization infrastructure to design, create, and scale investment products on any asset - quickly, flexibly, and off-balance sheet. Learn more by downloading the Assetization Playbook or booking a call.

• Read the new GenTwo whitepaper “Structured Products on Digital Assets: Closing the gap between crypto demand and bankable supply.”

Subscribe now

Spot the gap

As Florian writes, instead of the last mile of the journey, the Bitcoin ETF was more like the last turn before heading down the back stretch. It solved a major problem - access to digital assets - but didn’t take us to the finish line.

The reason is that ETFs give investors spot exposure to the assets. But institutional investors are used to more. They want “defined risk, defined return, a familiar legal wrapper, and a single line in their reporting.” They also want access to actively managed exposures. In other words, they want structured products.

And that’s exactly what’s missing.

Florian calls it a “supply gap.” His paper spells out what can be done about it from the point of view of the two main stakeholders best placed to change the situation – banks and asset managers – as well as the two main classes of structured products they will use to do so: asymmetric-type structured products that engineer a specific payoff profile at issuance, and tracker-type certificates reproduce the performance of an underlying.

Capital punishment

Banks are the natural manufacturers of asymmetric products, and stand to profit from market demand for such products on crypto underlyings. Unfortunately, current capital requirements around digital assets get in the way. Basel III stipulates a 1,250% risk weight on crypto, which translates into roughly one dollar of capital for every dollar of exposure. That makes most such products uneconomical. So even though they have the know-how, the client relationships, and the distribution channels, most banks simply can’t supply these products.

For their part, as Florian writes, independent asset managers have their client base and the strategies to cater to them, but lack an efficient way of bringing their ideas to market. This is where tracker-type certificates, and in particular the AMCs we have written a lot about here at The Assetizer, come in. They offer an efficient, cost-effective way for a manager to bundle a strategy into a bankable security with an ISIN, and react quickly to market demand.

The operative word is speed. Crypto markets move quickly. Managers need to rebalance, rotate, and respond to changing conditions inside a single investable instrument. The traditional route to a bankable format, launching a fund, takes months and can cost a small fortune.

Off the books, on to the shelf

The final question is how to make all of this work. As Florian writes in the paper, one issuance model resolves both problems: “A standalone, bankruptcy-remote special purpose vehicle (SPV).”

In this model the SPV “holds the exposure and can be used to issue structured products with digital asset underlyings as fully bankable securities with an ISIN. Nothing touches the bank’s balance sheet. Nothing requires the manager to become an issuer.”

As a result, the bank can build the full structured-product menu on digital assets without having to bear the prohibitive capital costs. And the asset manager can create custom, bankable, actively managed products without having to become an issuer. Best of all, the end investor “gets what they were asking for all along: crypto exposure with defined risk, defined return, and one clean line in the portfolio.”

For the details, read the paper or get in touch with Florian directly using the Book a Call link above.

For my part, having been through countless mainstream moments since I first fell into crypto in 2016 — amazing to think it’s been ten years! — it makes sense to me that true institutionalization will come when all the tools of the trade are finally in place.

We’re not there yet. But we’re getting closer.

All the best,
Tom

When does a new asset class really become a new asset class?

This question has been a subject of conversation around the office lately, in the context of digital assets. But the question is more fundamental, and goes to the heart of what assetization really is.

The obvious answer, one that you might get from an investment committee, is that an asset becomes a class when it is big enough (has a lot of value) to garner institutional interest, regulators get involved and sign off, and there is a long enough track record.

But the conversations we have been having made me suspect that this answer has it backwards. I did some digging with my trusty LLM into the history of finance, and we found that when new asset classes come into being, very often something else comes first.

Here are some examples.

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Brady Bonds

Firstly, it’s not always intrinsic value that makes an asset class.

Take Brady bonds. In the 1980s, a number of Latin American countries defaulted on their debt, leaving US banks stuck with piles of bad loans. (Bond markets had been as good as closed to risky sovereigns since the defaults of the 1930s, which is why so much lending sat on bank balance sheets to begin with.)

The defaults threatened a US banking crisis. So Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady proposed that banks accept a haircut in exchange for new, standardised bonds they could actually sell, with principal secured by long‑dated US Treasury zero‑coupon bonds, financed with IMF/World Bank money.

The plan worked, and then something unexpected happened. Seventeen countries eventually issued these bonds, creating for the first time in decades a pool of tradable risky‑sovereign debt. Indices were then built to track it, funds were launched to buy it, and banks set up desks to trade it.

Once that machinery existed, any risky country could sell ordinary bonds into it, no rescue needed. A market that had been practically dormant for fifty years reopened. The point is that the underlying didn’t change; it was the same promises from the same governments. What changed was the container.

Commodities

Second, if something does have intrinsic value, that doesn’t necessarily make it an asset class either.

Consider commodities. Commodity futures have existed since at least the 1850s. But to invest in them you had to buy the actual futures and then keep rolling them over before they came due, or risk taking delivery of actual wheat or soybeans. That’s a full-time job. Most investors interested in commodities, not to mention institutions like pension funds, are not interested in that kind of work just to hold an exposure.

Enter Goldman Sachs. In 1991 it released the Goldman Sachs Commodity Index (GSCI), the first investable index of its kind. The index did the rolling; banks could now offer simple products tracking it, and an investor could hold “commodities” as a single line in a portfolio. It took a while, but the money came: investment in products tracking these indices went from under 5 billion dollars in the late 1990s to over 100 billion by 2007, with pension funds allocating to commodities for the first time.

A century of futures attracted almost no investor money. One good wrapper attracted a hundred billion in fifteen years. Same commodities, different container. It was the quality of the wrapper that decided how much money would come.

Currencies

Finally, even easy access and obvious value get you nowhere if the asset pays nothing. Consider currencies.

Currencies have always been easy to access. Just go into a bank and you can exchange dollars for euros or anything else. But for a long time they were not an investment. Companies traded currencies as hedges to protect their businesses, and professional traders could bet on them. But there was no yield. A pile of yen is just a pile of yen.

That changed with the invention of dual currency bonds, where you invest in one currency and the principal is repaid in another, at an exchange rate fixed on day one. The classic buyers were Japanese insurers in the 1990s, starving for yield with domestic rates near zero.

These bonds paid them noticeably more than any yen bond could. This was partly because dollar interest rates were higher, and partly because the investor was being paid to accept a risk: if the dollar fell, the principal came back worth less. But at least the risk was clearly defined. You knew from day one exactly what you were paid and exactly where it could hurt. And that is what turned a yield-less exposure into something an ordinary bond portfolio could hold.

Conclusion

So the point I am trying to make is this: an asset can’t become an asset class until it has a financial wrapper. The quality of that wrapper decides how much investor money will come. And the best wrappers do something more: they define the risk, which is what makes an exposure something ordinary portfolios can hold.

What does this have to do with crypto? Well, digital assets are still waiting for their best wrappers. Tokens are wrappers too, but they only represent the raw asset, and most of the world doesn’t have a wallet and probably never will. ETFs opened the door by making the raw asset broadly accessible. But access is only chapter one. Every mature asset class offers more than access: income versions, protected versions, managed versions. That menu barely exists for digital assets yet.

We think it’s coming. Stay tuned, we’ll have a lot more to say about that soon.

All the best,
Tom

In this post I am concluding our series that summarizes the main chapters of our Assetization book. It covers chapter 9, where we both recap the main points of the book, and also say what we believe this means for the three main audiences we wrote the book for: investors, and the independent advisors and institutional wealth managers who serve them.

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The Essence of Assetization

The main thesis of the book is this: the investment industry is undergoing a structural shift, driven by technological breakthroughs and evolving financial engineering.

And two important things are happening as a result.

First, we are witnessing a kind of Cambrian explosion in terms of what is investible. This is happening on two fronts: previously hard-to-access investments like private equity, private credit, and real estate are opening up to regular investors, while things that weren’t readily investible at all until recently – wine, art, whisky, royalty streams – are increasingly being made so. The investment universe is both democratizing and expanding immensely.

Second, the same forces are reducing the cost of, and increasing access to, the tools of financial product creation. This is breaking the oligopoly that large financial institutions have long held over the product shelf. Independent asset managers, advisory boutiques, and family offices can now make their own products. One day, perhaps even non-financial actors like SMEs will be able to do the same.

All of this will obviously have important ramifications. We end the book with our opinion of what these are.

The End Game of Assetization

The main message to readers of the book is to invest in your beliefs. But there are many nuances to this, and it means different things depending on where you are in the value chain.

Investors: Invest in Your Beliefs

For investors, investing in your beliefs doesn’t mean do-goodism. It’s belief as conviction and self-direction.

Thanks to the advances in technology and financial engineering we describe in the book, the investment universe is expanding way beyond public markets, redefining what can even be considered investible. That matters, because public markets are only a fraction of the opportunity out there, and they are increasingly correlated. What you really want are two things: access to the real drivers of value, most of which were previously out of reach, and genuine diversification, meaning exposure to investments that respond differently to different economic conditions. Both of these things are now possible.

The upshot is that thanks to assetization you can now really build a portfolio that is uniquely yours. Before, it just kind of seemed that way. That’s new, and for those who know how to use it, a meaningful change.

Independents: Build What You Believe

For independent advisors, the heart of our message is to stop being an allocator of other people’s products and start building your own.

The backdrop to this story is that the independent advisor’s business is being attacked from many sides. Advisors are increasingly becoming pure allocators. Their brands are being subsumed into the brands of the off-the-shelf products they put in their clients’ portfolios. And those clients are losing patience with standardized portfolios.

Many traditional business advantages are disappearing. Advisors no longer have an information advantage – clients have all the information they need. They no longer have a monopoly on execution – there are plenty of low-cost options for clients to do it themselves. All of this creates fee pressure. In a world where so much is available directly, they want to know what they are paying you for. Where the value add is.

Assetization gives advisors the tools to show it. That’s why we say it’s time to stop being a conduit for other people’s products and start being the architect of solutions that bear your fingerprint – your research, your judgment, your understanding of your clients. Solutions they associate with you, not a third party.

This doesn’t mean abandoning the building blocks advisors already use; the funds and ETFs, the standard products and approaches we all know. It means that there is an opportunity in adding a customized layer on top. That’s why we talk so often about moving from curator to creator. The tools are coming online. Today advisors can much more easily build a track record for their ideas and expertise, become more differentiated, bring more genuine value add, and build a more successful – and importantly, more defensible – business.

Institutional Wealth Managers: Back the Future You Believe In

For institutional wealth managers, the challenge is structural. You are not as flexible as the independents. You have legacy infrastructure, complex processes, and strict risk and compliance constraints. At the same time, your clients are changing. The younger ones especially are far more experimental, far less loyal, and far more demanding of new and different solutions.

The institutional wealth manager feels this most acutely, sitting right on the front lines between the new world of the client and the old world of the bank.

Assetization helps here because it provides a language and a framework for advocating change from within. You can show how the tools are evolving to meet new client realities, and argue that it doesn’t have to happen all at once. Push for pilots, limited mandates. Just as the independent advisor uses assetization to add a layer of customization on top of their standard offering, you can push to add a layer of agility on top of yours.

The bank will never be as flexible as the independent. But it offers something the independent doesn’t necessarily have: stability, trust, regulatory infrastructure, research depth, and institutional knowhow. Clients still value that. Add a layer of agility, keep some of your clients’ experimentation in house – along with their assets – and you will be fit for the future.

All the best,
Tom

If you look at the history of finance from the very beginning, a few mega-trends jump out.

The first is democratization: as the system grows, it has always brought more access to more people. The second is the reduction of friction; the vast majority of innovations in finance have been there to reduce friction in the system. And the third is that financial engineering and technology have been the major drivers of both.

In Chapter 8 of our new book we dive into this in detail, to argue that assetization is simply another step on an inevitable arc.

Let’s look at the evidence.

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Democratization and reduction of friction

Money. It begins with money. Early money — shells and beads, gold and silver, coins — was physical, and it was the first financial abstraction. It reduced friction greatly in transactions, and it enabled longer-distance trade. Paper money was a new technology that reduced friction further still: you no longer had to carry big sacks of physical money around.

Growth of the commercial system through financial engineering. Limited liability companies reduced the risk in investing in a venture, and so made it safer for more people to do so. Joint-stock companies enabled more types of investors to get involved, increasing the investor base. Stock exchanges democratized the investment process even more, opening it to more people and more locations, and giving companies exposure to more investors. With dematerialization, digital technology moved in to hyper-boost this and hyper-scale it. Still, this was generally “gated” — available to those who could afford a seat at the table.

Growth of the retail system through financial engineering and technology. The mutual fund was the big bang that opened up investing to regular folks. IRAs, 401(k)s and retirement investing opened up investing to more people still, by making it easy — often automatic — to invest, getting even more people into the markets and used to them. Discount brokers brought more democratization by lowering the cost of trading. ETFs brought even more, lowering the cost of professional portfolio management even further than funds had, and making access much easier by being traded on exchanges. And blockchain and DeFi empower individuals by eliminating — at least in theory — the middleman, providing more access and more control to users; stablecoins promise to add programmable money and more global access to stable currencies and value.

The role of technology

No one doubts that technology has been a big factor in all of this. Writing itself, after all, is a technology. And some of our earliest examples of it – for example Sumerian cuneiform – seem to have been developed for bookkeeping purposes. Paper is a technology as well. So too were the telegraph, the radio and the telephone. All of these played key roles in the evolution of finance.

But of course it’s communications and digital technologies that have had the most scaling effect. Computers handled the calculations; the internet handled the communications. Together they lead to a fully dematerialized system, with instantaneous global transactions, trading and dissemination of financial information. Then comes blockchain, which decentralizes and democratizes, and offers a better way to settle and reconcile. And now AI, which is going to automate much of the work and expand access to knowledge.

Why this is relevant for assetization

Looked at from this lens, assetization can be seen as just another part of a wider story. The same forces of financial engineering and technology that shaped the rise, scaling and democratization of commercial and retail finance are now coming for the investment industry. They are driving the democratization of access to assets, and of the tools of financial product creation we talk about in the book. The dynamic is the same as we’ve seen time and again in the past.

Which is why we think it’s fairly inevitable.

This article is part of a series examining the ideas in Assetization: Inside the Trillion-Dollar Investing Revolution (Wiley, 2026). Read parts one, two, three, four and five here.

Chapter 7 of our Assetization book is entitled: “Untapped Assets – The Trillion‑Dollar Opportunity of Assetization.” In it we set ourselves a simple challenge: if assetization really worked as we described it, how big could the opportunity be?

In the book we were very clear, and we want to repeat it here: this was a back‑of‑the‑envelope exercise, not a piece of formal market analysis or an investment recommendation. We are practitioners, not research analysts, and our estimates rely on a number of simplifying assumptions. Still, we felt it was useful to get an order‑of‑magnitude sense of the assetization opportunity. In the first edition we had done something similar just for “non‑bankable” assets and came out at roughly 80 trillion dollars that could, in principle, be brought into the bankable world through securitization.

In the second edition our view of assetization was much broader, so naturally the result was too. Instead of looking only at non‑bankable assets, we looked at major pools of value that sit outside public equity and bond markets and asked what their total addressable market (TAM) might be from an assetization perspective.

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How we approached the problem

We started from a simple observation: most of the world’s wealth does not sit in public markets. Listed equities and bonds account for only a slice of global asset value; the rest is in real estate, private companies, private credit, infrastructure, and a range of other assets that most portfolios still struggle to reach.

From there, we went through major “off‑exchange” asset classes and looked for reasonable estimates of the TAM or documented funding gaps. For each bucket, we asked: how big is the pool, and how much of it is currently hard or impossible for most investors to access in an efficient, investible form? We stressed that we were not forecasting how much of that value will actually be securitized or tokenized, nor how quickly. The goal was simply to show how large the reservoir becomes once you look beyond listed stocks and bonds.

The numbers, asset class by asset class

In the chapter we then walked through seven categories and attached rough TAM figures to each. Here is what we came up with:

• Real estate — places of value (393.3 trillion dollars). Real estate is the original asset class: land and buildings where people live, work, shop, and produce. It remains the largest store of wealth on the planet. Drawing on Savills, we noted that the total value of global real estate reached nearly 393.3 trillion dollars at the end of 2024, split into 286.9 trillion of residential property, 58.5 trillion of commercial real estate, and 47.9 trillion of agricultural land. That is roughly three times the size of all the world’s stock markets combined, yet only a small fraction of it currently sits in investible vehicles like listed REITs and private real‑estate funds.

• Private equity — ventures of value (60 trillion dollars). Here we focused on unlisted operating businesses: the hundreds of thousands of companies that generate real cash flows but never make it onto an exchange. Using data from Scientific Infra & Private Assets (SIPA), we cited an “investible” private‑equity universe of roughly 900,000 to one million private companies worldwide that are large and transparent enough to attract institutional capital, with a combined equity value of around 60 trillion dollars—more than ten times the assets then managed by global private‑equity funds. For our purposes in the book, we treated that 60‑trillion‑dollar figure as a plausible proxy for the total assetizable private‑equity market.

• Private credit — value in lending (30 trillion dollars). Private credit, as we described it, is about filling the lending gap that opened up when post‑crisis regulation pushed banks to de‑risk their balance sheets and retreat from many forms of SME and corporate lending. We cited McKinsey’s estimate that the addressable market for private credit in the United States alone could be over 30 trillion dollars and, in the absence of reliable global data, we took that 30‑trillion‑dollar US figure as our working TAM. From an assetization standpoint, this represents a vast pool of loans that could, in principle, be packaged into more accessible investible products if the right structures and rails exist.

• Infrastructure — foundations of value (15 trillion dollars). Infrastructure covers the essential systems that keep the real economy running: power grids, transport networks, water systems, data centers, and more. We used figures from the Global Infrastructure Hub, which estimated that the world needs to invest 94 trillion dollars in infrastructure by 2040, but is on track to fall short by about 15 trillion dollars. We treated that 15‑trillion‑dollar funding gap as the relevant TAM from an assetization perspective: a volume of future projects that could become investible if sufficient private capital can be connected to them through appropriate products.

• Cryptocurrencies — tokens of value (10 trillion dollars). For crypto, we tried to strike a balance between promise and volatility. We acknowledged the history of booms and busts, frauds, and hacks, but also noted that Bitcoin and Ethereum point toward genuinely new forms of digital money and programmable infrastructure. In terms of size, we observed that the total crypto market at the time oscillated between roughly 2 and 4 trillion dollars and cited external projections that saw aggregate crypto market capitalization potentially reaching around 10 trillion dollars by 2030 as institutional adoption matures. For the chapter we treated that 10‑trillion‑dollar figure as a reasonable, if speculative, TAM for this bucket and noted that, because cryptocurrencies are already widely accessible, in principle the whole market is investible.

• Passion assets — value with meaning (2 trillion dollars). Passion assets—art, wine, collectibles, classic cars, watches, and similar objects—combine financial and emotional value. We cited Deloitte’s estimate that ultra‑high‑net‑worth individuals alone hold just over 2 trillion dollars in art and collectibles. In the chapter, we framed this 2‑trillion‑dollar figure as the relevant pool for assetization, noting that even modest progress in turning “storage wealth” sitting in vaults and freeports into more liquid, fractional investible exposure would represent a meaningful expansion of the universe.

• Frontier assets — new kinds of value (less than 0.5 trillion dollars today). Finally, we turned to a set of emerging experiments—music‑royalty securitizations, prediction markets, personal‑data monetization, sports‑betting platforms, and various attempts to tokenize future cash flows, reputation, or earning potential. We noted that cumulative issuance and volumes here were still well below half a trillion dollars in total and treated this as a tiny but symbolically important frontier category rather than a major TAM driver. The point we made was less about today’s size and more about how these experiments stretch the definition of what can be turned into an investible cash flow once the tools exist.

When we added up these figures—393.3 trillion for real estate, 60 trillion for private companies, 30 trillion for private credit, 15 trillion for infrastructure, 10 trillion for crypto and digital assets, 2 trillion for passion assets, plus a small frontier bucket—we arrived at a total of roughly 510 trillion dollars in potentially assetizable assets outside public markets.

The assetizable universe (255 trillion dollars)

In the book, we then took one more step, again with strong caveats. We wrote that we were well aware not all of this value will, or should, turn into tradeable paper and emphasized that many assets will remain privately held and some ideas should never become financial products. The numbers, we stressed, were meant to be rough, order‑of‑magnitude estimates.

With that in mind, we asked a simple “what if?” question: for the sake of argument, what if, over time, 50% of these asset pools ultimately became accessible in investible form—tokenized, securitized, or wrapped in liquid vehicles that investors and advisors can actually use? On that assumption, half of 510 trillion gives an “assetizable universe” of around 255 trillion dollars of additional assets entering portfolios.

We closed the chapter by noting that this was not a forecast or a target, merely a way of illustrating scale. Even if reality never comes close to that 50% scenario, the implication is clear: assetization is not about squeezing a few extra basis points out of existing products. It is about opening up a vastly larger, largely untapped universe of investible assets that sit beyond today’s public markets.

That, we argued, is quite a thought.

All the best,
Tom

As Assetizer readers will know, in April of this year we held our first Global AMC Summit at GenTwo. The event brought together legal authorities, market researchers, structuring specialists, digital asset practitioners and infrastructure builders for five days of sessions designed to cover the AMC landscape from first principles to the frontier.

I am happy to announce that we have now combined all the learnings from the eight sessions of the Summit into a comprehensive report. You can read it for free online:

• Read and Download the AMC Summit Report

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The Actively Managed Certificate has become one of the most interesting instruments in global structured products — and one of the least understood outside the circles that use it. That’s partly a complexity problem, partly a visibility problem.

We’ve covered them a fair amount in The Assetizer — from art investment to uranium portfolios to digital asset strategies. But we’ve never had the chance to take a proper panoramic view of the market: where it came from, where it stands, what goes inside these things, who uses them and how, and where they’re headed.

The GenTwo Global AMC Summit, held April 13–17, 2026, was the opportunity to do exactly that. It brought together legal authorities, market researchers, structuring specialists, digital asset practitioners and infrastructure builders for five days of sessions designed to cover the AMC landscape from first principles to the frontier.

This report is drawn from those sessions. Here’s what’s in it.

What is an AMC, exactly?

Legally, it’s a debt security — a bond issued by a bank, a securities dealer, or a special purpose vehicle. It holds a dynamic portfolio that a designated strategy manager can actively rebalance over the product’s lifetime. It behaves economically like a fund but isn’t one — and that distinction turns out to matter enormously.

A regulated fund requires authorization, a management company, a custodian, and ongoing regulatory reporting. Depending on the jurisdiction, launching one takes months and only becomes cost-effective at significant scale — typically $50 million in AUM or above. An AMC can be in the market in days or weeks, with a fraction of the compliance overhead. For strategies under $100 million, the cost saving over the life of the product can reach 60–70% compared to an equivalent fund structure.

What can go inside one?

Almost anything. Listed equities, bonds, ETFs and futures are the foundation. Private equity, private debt, real estate and infrastructure are now mainstream AMC underlyings. Digital asset strategies — from simple trackers to complex approaches incorporating staking, DeFi exposure and derivatives — are a growing and sophisticated category. At the outer edge, practitioners have structured art, wine, luxury watches, timber, carbon credits and pre-IPO positions into AMC form. The market has also expanded well beyond Switzerland: AMCs now serve offshore wealth management in Latin America, family offices across Europe and Asia, and markets where the combination of regulatory flexibility and low cost makes the structure particularly well-suited.

What the report covers

The report runs through seven sessions:

• AMC Foundations — Luca Bianchi, Kellerhals Carrard: the legal and technical basis, the on- versus off-balance-sheet distinction, and what an expanding asset universe means for practitioners today

• The AMC Market — Pablo Conde, SRP: the definitions problem that makes the market hard to measure, the competitive shift from product design to infrastructure, and the three-year outlook

• AMCs and the American Markets — Fernando Concha, Luma Financial Technologies: structural barriers in the US, surging Latin American demand, and what the product looks like in practice in a region moving fast

• AMCs and Digital Assets — Dominic Lohberger, Sygnum, and Florian Marty, GenTwo Digital: institutional-grade operational architecture in a post-FTX world, and where AI agents and blockchain-native infrastructure are taking the market

• The Asset Manager’s Perspective — Fabio Oertle, ISP Group: the full picture from a practitioner who has overseen more than 2,500 product launches

• Under the Hood — Matthew McShane and Pierric Tsien, GenTwo: a technical case study combining private equity, private debt and liquid assets in a single AMC — including what typically goes wrong

• Building the Rails — Lukas Sitar and Melanie Glöckler, GenTwo: the evolution of AMC discovery and execution infrastructure, and what end-to-end automation looks like from here

If you work in structured products, asset management, digital assets, or wealth management — and especially if you’ve ever wondered whether an AMC might be the right vehicle for a strategy — this report is for you.

All the best,
Tom

Read the AMC Summit Report here: Modern Perspectives on Actively Managed Certificates

Last week, on May 21 to be exact, we held the latest edition of Asset Rush, GenTwo’s flagship finance event. It followed the same format as always: it was held in Kaufleuten, one of Zurich’s premier nightclubs and concert venues; it featured five-minute presentations from a broad range of speakers across two blocks, as well as a live product pitch competition; and, following on from last year’s premiere, included the second edition of the AssetAwards.

As always, it also served as a good barometer for what is going on in our part of the industry. Below are five themes that stood out to me.

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The access problem is being solved — unevenly

The most persistent friction in modern finance is not a shortage of good ideas. It is the gap between a good idea and an investor being able to act on it. Several talks addressed that gap from different directions: structured products that exist legally but cannot find their way onto bank custody platforms; digital asset strategies with strong track records that most investors cannot access; entire communities of capital — running to trillions of euros — sitting idle because nobody has built the right wrapper.

A similar theme ran through the AssetAwards. One winner was recognized for bringing wine into a structured asset class framework alongside art and watches — opaque, fragmented, under-standardized for generations, now being addressed. Another for opening a mass-market payment app to stablecoins, tokenized deposits, and digital identity.

Infrastructure, again

As in previous years, infrastructure was a large part of the evening’s content. The unglamorous business of storing, validating, and governing assets — custody, in the technical sense — is a large part of what makes assetization work or fail in practice. One speaker made this case academically and persuasively: new technologies arrive, get celebrated, and then discover they still need to integrate into existing custodial frameworks. Another illustrated it commercially, showing that a twenty-year-old platform producing 500 customized structured products a day is still, by most definitions, innovative. A quieter moment mid-evening brought two long-standing architects of the Swiss structured products landscape onto the stage together to reflect on how the industry was built. The conclusion is the same as last year, stated with more evidence: the pipes matter as much as what flows through them.

AI is a filter, not simply a tool

Nobody at AssetRush 2026 was frightened of AI. Several speakers were actively using it. But the more interesting observation, made more than once, was what AI does to the competitive landscape: it removes information asymmetry as a sustainable edge.

Advisors and managers who built their value proposition on knowing things their clients didn’t will find that advantage eroding quickly. What will likely survive is judgment, trust, and relationships — things that cannot be automated because they are not, at root, informational.

The definition of an investible asset keeps broadening

True to the event’s name, many speakers discussed the evolution of what can be considered an investible asset. This included human longevity, which is becoming an institutional theme. Yield-bearing stablecoins used as collateral. And patent portfolios as alpha signals. One speaker talked about an entire community of investors — observant Muslims across Europe — with capital ready to deploy but no suitable structures to put it into.

This theme was echoed in the third AssetAward, which went to a thematic investing platform built around megatrends: water scarcity, digitization, demographics, the energy The evening’s live pitch also competition produced a slew of ideas ranging from the genuinely intriguing to the head-scratching. What is clear is that the definition of what constitutes an investible asset continues to broaden, and the infrastructure to support that expansion is catching up faster than most people in traditional finance realize.

Timing is a mindset

Another theme running through the evening was timing in finance, woven through the program by the MC across four short stories. None of them were the obvious ones. What they had in common: the people who got their timing right were not better informed than everyone else. They thought differently. They held convictions under pressure. They understood that the right decision and the optimal outcome are not always the same thing. It is not a new argument, but it was well told.

Until next year, Tom

In the previous pieces in this series I laid out our three-wave framework for how assetization plays out — the democratization of access, the containerization of finance, and the radical automation of the investment industry value chain.

In this piece I want to summarize our chapter on what this all means for independent asset managers and advisors as well as institutional wealth managers. As we argue, by democratizing the tools of financial product creation, assetization is giving financial intermediaries a level playing field. That has big ramifications for their business models, and the industry as a whole.

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The travel agent problem

Life is not easy for independent advisors and wealth managers right now. Fee compression from low-cost ETFs and zero-commission platforms erodes revenue from one side. Compliance costs push expenses up from the other. And somewhere in the middle, the value proposition is getting harder to articulate. When an advisor recommends a BlackRock or Vanguard fund, the client can reasonably ask why they need the advisor at all.

We’ve seen this movie before. Travel agents were indispensable until airline websites and booking platforms made it possible to buy flights directly, often more cheaply. Independent bookshops and record stores were valued for their curation until Amazon and Spotify overwhelmed them with unlimited, cheap choice. Wealth managers risk following the same path.

As investment products become more accessible and platforms more sophisticated, the value of simply selecting from existing options diminishes. To remain relevant, advisors need to offer something the platforms cannot — not just better curation, but genuine customization.

The creator economy comes to finance

This is where assetization enters the picture.

The chapter’s central argument is that the infrastructure being built across the three waves allows advisors and wealth managers to make a specific transition: from curators of other people’s products to creators of their own. And that shift, the book argues, changes the business fundamentally.

The book makes this vivid through Barbara, the independent advisor persona who runs through the whole book. As a creator, Barbara can finally stand out. For years she has been offering the same funds as everyone else. When the investments all come from the same handful of manufacturers, her value disappears into someone else’s brand. Building her own solutions puts her name on the investment, not the manufacturer’s.

She can recover margin. The moment she recommends cheap mass-market products she enters a race she cannot win. When she creates something that reflects a real idea and a real client need, she is no longer being compared to an app. She earns her margin again.

She can retain assets. When she recommends an external fund, the money leaves her orbit and strengthens someone else’s franchise. When she creates her own products, those assets stay connected to her and become the foundation for long-term relationships.

She can act fast. When several clients start asking about the same theme — clean energy, a regional opportunity, a new technology — she no longer has to explain that nothing on the shelf matches that conversation. She can respond. Trends that used to slip through her fingers become investible ideas.

And crucially, she does not need to become a technician to do any of this. The infrastructure handles the heavy lifting. She gets the kudos.

Most importantly, she regains her professional purpose. She became an advisor to guide people, not to fill in forms and pass along the same dozen products. Creation puts her judgment back at the center.

If You Can’t Beat Them, Join Them

Institutional wealth managers, represented in the book by the persona of Clark, have less freedom. There are processes, compliance committees, and all the usual institutional machinery. But professionals like Clark are not blind to what is happening — younger clients experimenting elsewhere, assets trickling to competitors, the slow erosion of relevance.

The book’s answer for Clark is partnership. Private banks rarely build complicated issuance infrastructure in-house. They don’t need to. They work with specialist platforms that handle the technical heavy lifting while the institution does what it does best: client relationships, governance, custody. Clark’s real edge is that he talks to clients every day and hears what the institution cannot currently meet. His job is to translate that into a case for change — pilots, narrow use cases, defined client segments, clear suitability rules — and to make it before time runs out.

Two opportunities at once

The chapter closes by framing this as two distinct opportunities sitting simultaneously on the table.

The first is professional. The tools now exist to say yes more often and more precisely — to design solutions that closely match what individual clients care about, to help investors put money behind ideas that matter rather than whatever happens to be on someone else’s shelf. Genuine guidance becomes a premium in a world of unlimited choice.

The second is commercial. Assetization flips the dynamic of the middleman squeeze. Armed with the right tools, advisors can break free from the standardised product shelf, recapture the margin and brand recognition that slip away when recommending someone else’s solution, and build a business model based on tailored solutions rather than volume. Personalized products anchor clients to the advisor, not just to the product provider.

The book’s closing note on this is worth repeating. The cost and complexity of trying something new have never been lower. Small steps matter. And early adopters have the chance to shape the advisor’s business in ways that were out of reach only a few years ago.

All the best, Tom

This article is part of a series in which I summarize the key ideas of Assetization: Inside the Trillion-Dollar Investing Revolution (Wiley, 2026). Read parts one, two and three here.

In the last two pieces in this series — in which I summarize the key ideas of our new book — I have been laying out our framework for how assetization plays out. We see it happening in three distinct waves. The first is about democratizing access to private and alternative investments. The second is about democratizing the tools for investment product creation and distribution. With those pieces in place, we argue, the conditions are set for a radical automation of the entire investment industry value chain. That is the subject of Wave 3.

• GenTwo provides the securitization infrastructure to design, create, and scale investment products on any asset - quickly, flexibly, and off-balance sheet. Learn more by downloading the Assetization Playbook or booking a call.

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Prompt to product

To illustrate what radical automation might look like in practice, the book opens this chapter with a short thought experiment set in an art gallery. An advisor encounters a gallery owner whose collection she thinks could be turned into an investable product. She opens an app. Within seconds, AI agents have researched the artist, assessed viability, structured a product, drafted the term sheet, written the contracts, handled compliance, and prepared marketing materials. The product is issued. The first investor comes in within minutes. We made a short video of this scenario, which you can watch here.

We are explicit in the book that this is a provocation, not a product roadmap. But it is a deliberate one — designed to make a point about the direction of travel.

To explain what makes this plausible, the book reaches for two analogies. The first is 3D printing, which embedded the complexity of manufacturing into a machine accessible to anyone with a desktop. The second, and more resonant, is vibe coding — the use of AI agents to build complete software applications from simple natural language prompts, no coding knowledge required. The question we ask in the book is straightforward: if a non-programmer can tell an AI to build a music app and get working software in minutes, why can’t a wealth manager tell an AI to structure a diversified art collection as an investment product and get term sheets, legal documents, compliance checks, and marketing materials just as quickly?

Our thesis is that this will become possible. The modular infrastructure of Wave 2 — the disaggregated, standardized, interoperable value chain — is precisely what makes it inevitable. When each component of the product creation process exists as a digital service, automation of the whole is the next logical step.

Four things automation will change

The chapter makes four specific predictions about what a fully automated financial product lifecycle will mean in practice.

First, advisors and wealth managers will have direct access to product creation tools. Capabilities previously locked inside the product factories of large banks will become available to independent professionals. The barrier to entry for product creation will continue to fall.

Second, investment marketplaces will become open and universal. Distribution, like creation, will be automated — connecting product creators and investors globally, bypassing traditional gatekeepers. The friction between a good idea and a willing investor will approach zero.

Third, everyone can become a seller. This is perhaps the most structurally significant prediction. The distinction between buy side and sell side — which has organized the investment industry for generations — begins to dissolve. Those who were previously only consumers of financial products can become creators and distributors of their own.

Fourth, almost everything can become investible. From art collections to industrial machinery, from intellectual property to local real estate, almost any verifiable economic value can be wrapped into a product and brought to market. The investible universe expands dramatically.

Honest about the timeline

Obviously this is all speculative at the moment. But we think it’s plausible. AI is already playing a significant role in financial services, and the early signs of automation in product creation are visible.

So we are confident about the direction of travel. The logic of Waves 1 and 2 points here. The infrastructure is being built. And in financial history, the gap between a plausible vision and a working reality has a habit of closing faster than anyone expects.

All the best,
Tom

This article is part of a series in which I summarize the key ideas of Assetization: Inside the Trillion-Dollar Investing Revolution (Wiley, 2026). Read parts one and two here.

As Assetizer readers will know, at the heart of our new book is a three-wave framework for how investment infrastructure is democratizing. The first wave is the democratization of access to private markets, which has been gaining momentum over the past decade or so.

In this post I want to look at the second wave, which we call the containerization of finance. Here we are talking about the democratization of the tools of financial product creation, and ultimately the whole investment product lifecycle.

Below a short summary of the main ideas.

More on the book here: www.assetizationbook.com.

• GenTwo provides the securitization infrastructure to design, create, and scale investment products on any asset - quickly, flexibly, and off-balance sheet. Learn more by downloading the Assetization Playbook or booking a call.

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The containerization of finance

To explain what’s happening, the book reaches for an analogy from a different industry entirely.

In 1956, a trucking entrepreneur named Malcom McLean loaded the first standardized shipping containers onto a converted tanker in Newark, New Jersey. The idea was simple: instead of loading and unloading individual cargo items at every port, everything would travel in identical, interchangeable boxes. It seems obvious in retrospect. At the time it was revolutionary. The container didn’t just speed up shipping. It rewired global trade, collapsed costs, and made the modern global economy possible. The key to all of this, as with so many technological revolutions, was standardization.

The financial industry, like most industries, knows well the value of standardization. It long ago invented the security. Whether a stock, a bond, or a certificate, a security is essentially a standardized container for assets. It is a contract that allows a claim on an asset to be bought, sold, and held through a common infrastructure. That standardization is what made modern capital markets possible in the first place.

Standardization and modularization

But while securities have done an incredible amount to standardize finance and enable a globalized financial system, creating securities has remained in what we call a “pre-McLean” state. For most of the industry’s history, creating a financial product has been a custom, expensive, and heavily intermediated process. Each project required specialist legal work, regulatory navigation, and the infrastructure of a large institution.

GenTwo is one of the companies that have come on the scene to fix that: to standardize, modularize, and as far as possible automate the securitization process, with the aim of bringing costs down and opening up the tooling to many more users and for many more use cases.

We are of course not alone. History has shown us time and again that industries move toward the removal of friction through standardization, modularization, and automation. This one is no different.

Updating the value chain

This pattern has played out in many other areas of finance, and now it is the turn of the process for creating and distributing financial products.

We think that two developments are particularly important.

First, we are seeing the whole investment industry architecture disaggregating, modularizing, and standardizing. Not just the securitization part, but the distribution part, the valuation part, the custody part, the compliance part, and more.

Second, with the advent of blockchain and tokenization, a new and potentially much better form of financial wrapper has emerged. Tokens are the financial containers of the future, offering potentially greater standardization, automation, efficiencies, and new kinds of global distribution rails.

What this means in practice

To understand the ramifications of this, it is worth being clear about how Wave 2 differs from Wave 1. Wave 1 has broadened access to private and alternative assets, but it remains intermediated, still largely in the hands of large incumbents as well as some new entrants. In Wave 2, the tools are opened up to users directly, for instance independent asset managers or family offices.

These no longer need to be distributors of other people’s products but can become architects of their own. Armed with the right infrastructure, an independent advisor, family office or wealth management team can design, structure, and issue products that precisely fit their clients’ needs, without the budget, the balance sheet, or the bureaucracy of a large institution.

We have seen this movie before. The book draws parallels with other industries where the same pattern has already played out. In publishing, standardized digital formats and on-demand printing meant anyone could become a publisher. In e-commerce, payment gateways and fulfillment platforms meant anyone could become a merchant. In technology, cloud computing meant anyone could become a developer. In each case, standardization and modularization turned a vertically integrated privilege into an open toolkit. Finance is next.

That is what Wave 2 amounts to. And it in turn lays the groundwork for something even more radical: the automation and disintermediation of the entire product lifecycle. That is what we call Wave 3. If Wave 2 is about opening up the toolkit, Wave 3 is about what happens when the toolkit starts running itself. More on that next time.

All the best,
Tom

This article is part of a series examining the ideas in Assetization: Inside the Trillion-Dollar Investing Revolution (Wiley, 2026).

In the previous piece in this series summarizing the key ideas of our new book I looked at what we call the “buy side” – investors, advisors, and wealth managers – and why their growing dissatisfaction with the status quo is one of the primary forces reshaping the investment industry.

In this piece I turn to the first response to that pressure: what we describe in the book as the “democratization of access,” or Wave 1 of assetization. Here is what that chapter argues.

• GenTwo provides the securitization infrastructure to design, create, and scale investment products on any asset - quickly, flexibly, and off-balance sheet. Learn more by downloading the Assetization Playbook or booking a call.

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Stuck in a seller’s market

For most of the history of modern investing, institutions decided what products existed and investors chose from the menu. That’s what a seller’s market means in this context — not price gouging, but control. From the Dutch East India Company’s public shares in the 1600s, through investment trusts, mutual funds, and online brokerages, each wave expanded access. But the fundamental structure held: a handful of large manufacturers decided what was available, and everyone else picked from the list. Building investment products required specialist expertise, regulatory compliance, and economies of scale that only large institutions could absorb. The menu was always someone else’s.

Around the turn of the millennium, that began to change. We argue in the book that finance has been having its streaming moment — and that the ETF is our exhibit number one.

The streaming moment

Think about what Spotify did to the music industry. Before streaming, record labels controlled what reached listeners — which artists got signed, which albums got made, which genres got shelf space. Consumers could choose from the catalog. They had no say in the catalog itself. Streaming didn’t just cut prices. It transferred control. Suddenly listeners could curate their own experience from an almost unlimited universe of options. The labels didn’t disappear, but their grip on what people could hear was broken.

The conventional explanation for the ETF’s dominance is cost — lower fees than actively managed funds, comparable or better performance. We think that explanation misses what actually happened. ETFs won because they shifted decision-making power from product manufacturers to investors. With thousands of sector, thematic, factor, and geographic building blocks available, investors stopped selecting fund managers and started constructing portfolios. The individual funds may be passive. The investor isn’t.

The numbers are striking. As of late 2025, the global ETF industry encompasses over 15,000 products and $18.8 trillion in assets under management. In the first nine months of 2025 alone, investors withdrew nearly $500 billion from US mutual funds and put over $1 trillion into ETFs. The firms losing assets aren’t losing because they’re active. They’re losing because they still behave as if they get to decide what investors should own.

There’s a paradox worth noting here. The industry looks more concentrated than ever — BlackRock and Vanguard dominating flows — yet simultaneously more individualised, as millions of investors make their own allocation decisions using those giants’ tools. The winners in the buyer’s market are the ones who understood that their job was to provide building blocks, not hand down verdicts.

This, we argue, is what Wave 1 of assetization looks like in its early form. And lately it has been accelerating.

Three ways Wave 1 is picking up speed

The first is the convergence of public and private markets. BlackRock, JPMorgan, KKR and other heavyweights are investing billions to bring private equity, private credit, infrastructure, and real assets within reach of ordinary investors. What once required multimillion-dollar minimums and the right connections is being repackaged into retail-friendly structures. The motivation is straightforward: there is enormous unmet demand from investors who want exposure to assets that public markets don’t offer, and the industry has finally decided to chase it.

The second is a new generation of digital platforms that bypass traditional gatekeepers entirely. For direct investors, platforms like Moonfare offer institutional-quality private equity with lower minimums and simple digital onboarding. For advisors, platforms like iCapital and CAIS function as B2B marketplaces — streamlining access to private market investments, handling legal and operational complexity, and freeing advisors to focus on clients rather than paperwork. Further along the frontier, tokenization platforms like Securitize are using blockchain infrastructure to offer 24/7 trading, near-instant settlement, and smart contract automation. The friction is coming down fast.

The third is DIY finance tools that put portfolio construction directly in investors’ hands. Zero-commission trading, fractional shares, and robo-advisors have collectively lowered the barrier to building and managing a diversified portfolio to almost nothing. The investor as active constructor — rather than passive fund selector — is now a realistic option for a much wider population.

Good news, with a caveat

Wave 1 is real and substantial. The buyer’s market has arrived. Choice has expanded dramatically, costs have fallen, and assets that were once the exclusive preserve of large institutions are becoming broadly accessible.

But we also make the case in the book that Wave 1 has a ceiling, and it matters.

Investors can now access more. They still depend on institutions to create what they access. The menu is bigger and cheaper. Someone else is still writing it. Private market platforms have proliferated — but the products on offer are still designed by large asset managers. Tokenization is opening new possibilities — but the underlying assets still need to be packaged by someone with the infrastructure to do it.

The buyer’s market, for all its progress, remains a market where sellers ultimately decide what exists. And as we showed in the previous piece, public markets — where most of this choice still lives — represent a shrinking slice of the real economy. The majority of the world’s wealth sits in assets that most portfolios still cannot reach.

That gap is what Wave 2 is about. More on that next time.

All the best,
Tom

The GenTwo Global AMC Summit is now complete. Eight sessions, five days, speakers from across the industry — legal experts, structuring specialists, market researchers, digital asset practitioners, and our own teams at GenTwo. Attendance held strong throughout the week, with close to 150 people signed up for Friday’s final session alone.

If you missed the first five sessions, I wrote about the main themes from those in last week’s edition. The short version: the AMC is no longer a Swiss private banking secret, the SPV changed everything, and the competitive edge in this market has moved decisively from product to infrastructure. That post covers the ground well, so I won’t repeat it. What I want to do here is pick up where it left off.

The final three sessions — a technical Masterclass, an AMC Community Breakfast, and a deep dive into GenTwo’s AMC Creator — added three important themes to the picture.

• GenTwo provides the securitization infrastructure to design, create, and scale investment products on any asset - quickly, flexibly, and off-balance sheet. Learn more by downloading the Assetization Playbook or booking a call.

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The AMC is one of the most flexible wrappers available in today’s market

We built our Thursday Masterclass around a single synthetic case study: a hybrid AMC combining private equity, private debt, and listed liquid assets within a single certificate. We chose this structure because it represents one of the more sophisticated uses of the format, and because the question of what an AMC can actually hold is one we get asked constantly.

The short answer is: more than you think.

Our structuring and legal teams walked through the full lifecycle of this kind of issuance — documentation, regulatory perimeter, fee architecture, lifecycle management, and the practicalities of adding new non-bankable assets after launch. What emerged wasn’t just a technical overview but a demonstration of what AMC flexibility actually looks like in practice.

The most vivid illustration was the thematic portfolio. Imagine a healthcare-focused strategy: private equity in high-growth healthcare companies, private debt in the form of loans to healthcare businesses, and listed equities and ETFs in the public healthcare sector. One conviction. Three distinct income streams. One ISIN. That is possible today with an AMC, and it has no real structural equivalent in any other vehicle without significantly greater regulatory overhead.

The regulatory picture also came through clearly. An AMC is not a collective investment scheme. It is not a FINMA-regulated product. But it operates within a well-defined framework — in our case study, the issuer authorised in Guernsey, the paying agent and custodian carrying their own regulatory status, the Protected Cell Company structure providing full legal ring-fencing between products. For strategies under $100 million, the cost saving versus an equivalent fund structure runs at 60 to 70 percent. Time from signed agreement to live ISIN: four to six weeks.

None of that is magic. It is engineering. And the Masterclass was, in a sense, a look under the hood.

The AMC industry is seeing more transparency and more sophisticated infrastructure

The AMC Creator session, which closed the week, came at the subject from a different angle. Where the Masterclass was about what AMCs can do, the Creator conversation was about what the market currently lacks: transparency and a common vocabulary.

Today, every provider in the market describes their capabilities differently, structures fees differently, bundles services differently. The only way to compare them has been to have five separate sales conversations over several weeks. That is a friction cost the market has largely accepted — until now.

The AMC Creator is GenTwo’s response. The analogy is booking.com: you know you want to go somewhere, you have a rough sense of your requirements, but you want to explore options, toggle filters, see what changes in real time — without committing to anything. The tool is designed to feel like a calculator, not a contract. A portfolio manager can enter their asset class, regulatory status and jurisdiction, and see which provider and structure combinations are available, with transparent pricing by volume tier.

What is perhaps more interesting than the tool itself is what its development revealed. When the first version launched last summer — built deliberately scrappy, as a vibe-coded MVP — thousands of visitors came through in the first weeks. The data showed that users didn’t want a linear funnel. They wanted to explore. That insight drove a full redesign, away from sequential steps towards something genuinely dynamic.

The roadmap from here includes international partners, content built around AMC education, and ultimately an end-to-end launch journey through the platform itself. As I said to close the session, the tooling you see today is the worst it will ever be. That’s true of most things in this market right now.

What’s next

All session videos will be posted shortly — if you registered for any session, you’ll receive the links directly. We are also working on a full AMC report drawing on everything covered during the week, which I expect to publish in early June. It will go deeper than a Summit summary. More on that soon.

Tom Lyons, GenTwo

We’re in the middle of our Global AMC Summit Week, and it has already exceeded expectations. Five sessions down and we’ve already had a legal and technical deep dive, a digital assets panel, a market data session, a look at the Americas, and a practitioner’s guide to launching.

Still to come are our AMC Master Class as well as our AMC Creator demo (and, if you are in Zurich, there’s also tomorrow’s AMC Breakfast). If you are interested in any of these, you can still sign up with this link:

• GenTwo Global AMC Summit 2026

In the meantime, here is an overview of some of the more interesting themes that we’ve covered so far.

• GenTwo provides the securitization infrastructure to design, create, and scale investment products on any asset - quickly, flexibly, and off-balance sheet. Learn more by downloading the Assetization Playbook or booking a call.

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The AMC is no longer a Swiss private banking secret

We’ve heard this from multiple directions now, but Pablo Conde from SRP put it most directly: the AMC is “moving out of the shadows.” For years it was a widely-used but poorly-understood instrument, concentrated in Swiss private banking and external asset management. That’s changing. The SRP AMC report — which Pablo walked us through on Tuesday — found practitioners from global banks, independent platforms, technology firms, index providers, and distribution partners all actively shaping the market. The geography has shifted too. Switzerland remains the natural home, but meaningful activity is now happening across continental Europe, the UK, Singapore, and Hong Kong, with Latin America emerging as a particularly interesting frontier.

Fernando Concha from Luma described an appetite in the region that was hard to overstate, and made a compelling case for why: LatAm investors have specific and concrete reasons to want AMCs — from accessing locally-traded assets like Brazilian or Peruvian equities through international accounts, to converting income tax into capital gains in jurisdictions where that distinction matters, to simply being able to hold a strategy inside an existing Merrill Lynch or Pershing account rather than a disconnected offshore fund structure. The AMC, in that context, is solving real problems rather than creating new ones.

The SPV changed everything

Luca Bianchi and Fabio Oertle from ISP both described the shift from on-balance-sheet bank issuance to SPV-based structures as the pivotal moment in the AMC’s development. The move eliminated issuer credit risk — the Lehman scenario — and simultaneously unlocked a much wider investment universe. Banks are constrained by risk-weighted assets: they don’t want crypto, private equity, or illiquid positions on their balance sheets, and the capital costs make it prohibitive. An SPV carries no such constraint. The result is that AMCs now hold everything from top-20 cryptocurrencies to racehorses to Paraguayan real estate. Whether or not you’re interested in the exotic end, the open architecture principle — that an asset manager is no longer tied to a single broker desk or a bank’s approved asset list — has been transformative. The AMC didn’t just get cheaper and faster in its second wave. It got fundamentally more useful.

The competitive edge has moved from product to infrastructure

This came up in almost every session. Pablo captured it most cleanly, quoting a practitioner who said there is “no real competition anymore on the payoff.” The structured note you can build inside an AMC is no longer the differentiating factor. What matters now is the infrastructure behind it — how quickly you can issue, how smoothly you can manage the lifecycle, how well your systems communicate with custodians and investors. Fabio put this in human terms: the typical AMC user is not a large institution but a small to medium-sized professional asset manager with a good strategy, a growing client base, and a real operational problem to solve. The AMC lets them manage one pooled portfolio instead of executing the same trade across fifty separate client accounts — a difference that compounds quickly as a business scales.

The use cases are broader than most people realize

Fernando’s taxonomy of four use cases in Latin America was one of the clearest framings we’ve had all week: strategy wrappers that function like a low-cost mini hedge fund, jurisdiction trackers that make locally-traded assets accessible from international accounts, tax structuring that converts income into capital gains in markets where that matters, and the securitization of non-bankable assets into bankable certificates. Pablo added that across the SRP report, the most consistent finding wasn’t one specific exotic use case but “the normalization of complexity” — AMCs are increasingly being used for strategies that would previously have been hard to distribute at scale.

Tokenization: interesting, contested, not yet here

We had a genuine debate about this on Monday night between Florian Marty and Dominic Lohberger from Sygnum. Florian’s view is that tokenizing an AMC opens up an entirely new distribution channel among crypto-native platforms and custodians. Dominic’s concern is liquidity fragmentation — you end up with three competing markets where you previously had one. Pablo found a similarly mixed picture across the SRP interviews. Our read, for now, is that tokenization remains strategically interesting and worth preparing for, but it is not yet a core driver of how AMCs are issued or distributed. That may change — but probably not this week.

As mentioned, we still have three sessions ahead of us: Thursday’s GenTwo Masterclass, where our own structuring team will walk through a live case study; Friday morning’s AMC Community Breakfast here in Zurich, sponsored by Swissquote; and Friday afternoon’s deep dive into the AMC Creator. A full report covering everything will go out to everyone who registered, (hopefully) within two to three weeks of the end of the week.

All the best,
Tom

A few weeks ago I shared the first outline of the GenTwo Global AMC Summit — a week of webinars and in-person events on the topic of Actively Managed Certificates, running April 13–17.

Since then, two significant additions have come through: SRP, the structured products research authority, will be joining us to present findings from their just-published 2026 AMC Report, and Swissquote will be sponsoring the AMC Breakfast on Friday morning.

With the program now complete, I thought I would give you a final overview of the program and three reasons why it’s worth it to sign up for some or all of the sessions.

• Sign up for all sessions here: GenTwo Global AMC Summit

• For the new SRP session here: The AMC Market in 2026

• For the AMC Breakfast here: AMC Breakfast with Swissquote

• GenTwo provides the securitization infrastructure to design, create, and scale investment products on any asset - quickly, flexibly, and off-balance sheet. Learn more by downloading the Assetization Playbook or booking a call.

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Reason 1: You’ll come away with a real understanding of what AMCs are — and where the market stands

The week opens with Luca Bianchi, partner at Kellerhals Carrard and widely recognised as Switzerland’s foremost legal expert on AMCs. He’s watched this market grow from its post-GFC origins to multi-billion AUM across 15 years and around 100 clients. The session covers the full foundations: what an AMC actually is in legal and structural terms, the SPV vs. on-balance-sheet distinction, why the regulatory setup makes AMCs so much faster and cheaper than a fund, and when they make sense — and when they don’t.

Then there’s the SRP session. Structured Retail Products is the market’s independent research authority, and they’ll be joining the Summit to present findings from their just-published 2026 AMC Report. Current estimates of global market size range from hundreds of billions to USD 1.6 trillion, partly because nobody in the industry has agreed on a definition yet. Pablo Conde will take us through that, as well as the provider landscape, the real advantages of AMCs over funds, the risks that come with the structure, the regulatory picture, the geographic spread, and where the market is heading. And he’ll walk through what AMCs are actually being used for today, from carbon credits, esports and Web3 to pig farming.

Reason 2: Practical guidance on what it actually takes to get one done

Four sessions approach the how-to question from different angles.

ISP’s Fabio Oertle has processed hundreds of AMC launches from the infrastructure side. That vantage point gives him a specific kind of intelligence that’s hard to get elsewhere. His session maps the full AMC lifecycle from an asset manager’s perspective: the five steps from idea to live product, the bankable and non-bankable paths, what asset managers consistently underestimate, and where the market is heading — including the emerging question of AI-driven strategies and what it means for the AMC model when the manager isn’t regulated.

Our GenTwo Master Class goes inside a specific real-world issuance with GenTwo’s structuring and legal teams. The case study format means a look at actual decisions and best practice at each stage: compliance, product legal, term sheet, listing, and lifecycle management. It’s a rare look under the hood and especially interesting for anyone who has never been through the process before, or who is looking to understand the process better from a practitioner’s point of view.

The AMC Creator session, with Melanie Glöckler, takes a different angle: buyer research. Melanie has been studying how different types of potential AMC clients think about, evaluate, and choose their route to issuance — three distinct profiles emerge. The session also introduces the Creator tool itself, a structured comparison platform across AMC providers and custodians, and what it signals about where the market is heading.

The AMC Breakfast with Swissquote is the informal version of all of the above: a peer conversation over coffee on Friday morning, no slides, no pitch. Just ask the experts and share your thoughts. A great opportunity to talk shop over coffee and croissants.

Reason 3: A look at AMCs working in the real world

Two sessions on specific contexts where AMCs are doing something distinctive.

Luma Financial’s Fernando Concha Bambach covers the Americas. The US picture is largely a cautionary tale — tax and regulatory headwinds explain why AMCs haven’t taken hold there. The LatAm story is different and considerably more interesting. AMCs are being used in four established ways: as strategy vehicles, as trackers for assets difficult to access in certain jurisdictions, as tax-efficient wrappers, and as vehicles for illiquid cross-border investments. Luma is also developing a fifth use case — structured note AMCs — which they believe could bring a historically niche asset class to a much wider investor base.

Sygnum’s Dominic Lohberger and GenTwo Digital’s Florian Marty cover the digital asset side — not what’s theoretically possible, but what’s actually being done. The session maps where AMCs sit on a digital asset manager’s maturity curve, what state-of-the-art custody looks like for trading-heavy crypto strategies, and how lending and staking are being integrated. There’s also a genuine on-stage disagreement about tokenization that makes this one worth watching if you’re sitting on the fence about digital asset AMCs.

All the best,
Tom