Expert Advice on AMCs: The View from Finanz26

This newsletter is part of The Assetizer, GenTwo's thought leadership platform.

Finanz is one of the leading B2B financial services conferences in Switzerland. This year GenTwo CEO Philippe Naegeli joined a panel on AMCs — Actively Managed Certificates — alongside issuers and distributors from Leonteq, BCV, and Luzerner Kantonalbank. As it turned out, they had some useful advice for advisors and investors, particularly those unfamiliar with the instrument.

In this post I’ve summarized the highlights.  

AMCs are magic...

For those not familiar with them, an AMC is a certificate — a structured product — that wraps around an investment strategy or a basket of assets. Unlike a traditional structured note, it is dynamic: the manager can adjust the portfolio within a pre‑defined universe as conditions change. And that universe can contain virtually anything: equities, bonds, private equity, private debt, digital assets, alternatives. One panelist noted he is seeing more and more hedge funds being packaged inside AMCs, for instance. That is not surprising. As Philippe put it, “the magic of the AMC is that any asset can become investible, can be brought into portfolios.”

Compared to a fund, it is faster and leaner: lower overhead, quicker time‑to‑market, and in Switzerland it does not usually qualify as a collective investment scheme, which removes a significant regulatory layer. As an instrument for testing new strategies — particularly in an environment where income generation has become harder and active management more valued — it is hard to beat.

...but they still have a first‑date problem

Despite all that, AMCs are not yet universally understood. The panel was candid about this. The first AMC is almost always the hardest because of the educational element. Advisors need to have it explained. Investors need to have it explained. The process takes time and patience.

That work is usually worth it. Once someone has been through the process, the instrument clicks. The challenge, then, is less about the product and more about getting people through that first door. As one panelist put it: “If they do one, they almost always do more.”

The risk questions you should be asking

Before you choose an AMC issuer, there are some fundamental questions worth working through. The panel identified two in particular.

The first is counterparty risk. Many AMCs are issued as on‑balance‑sheet debt of a bank or issuer, so investors are exposed to that issuer’s credit risk in addition to the strategy risk. Investors therefore need to consciously manage this exposure – for example through issuer selection, collateralised structures (such as SIX’s Triparty Collateral Management framework in Switzerland), or other credit‑risk mitigants – particularly in markets where no standardised collateral solution exists. Issuer risk is not necessarily a dealbreaker, but it is a factor that deserves explicit attention.

The growing alternative is off‑balance‑sheet issuance — the approach GenTwo uses. Here the product is fully funded, which means counterparty risk is materially reduced and shifted to the robustness of the SPV, its service providers, and the legal setup. The advisor retains control, and because the structure is independent of a bank, there is far less vendor lock‑in: more choice of custodians, paying agents, and partners. Both approaches have their place, but the distinction matters.

The second question is issuer fit. Are you comfortable with this issuer over a five‑year horizon or longer? What are their fees? What is their execution quality? These are basic questions, but they are easy to skip when the instrument itself is doing the selling.

Considering geography

The regulatory framework for AMCs is not harmonised globally. A significant share of the AMC market is currently concentrated in Switzerland, reflecting the fact that Swiss regulators have provided a relatively clear and established framework for these instruments, which many other jurisdictions do not yet match.

Outside Switzerland, the picture is uneven. South Africa offers a reasonable degree of clarity, and several Asian markets are moving in the right direction, albeit from different starting points. Continental Europe, despite its sophistication as a financial centre, has so far been more hesitant, with regulators slower to develop a settled view on AMCs. The core challenge is that the Swiss treatment of AMCs does not automatically carry over to other markets; each jurisdiction requires its own regulatory groundwork and, in many cases, bespoke structuring.

This is not a reason for pessimism; it is simply a snapshot of the current landscape. The Swiss experience shows that regulatory clarity can drive adoption. Other markets appear to be on a similar trajectory, but at earlier stages of the journey.

Platforms and the maturity signal

The panel also touched on platforms, and the mood there was notably positive. The number of AMC platforms is growing, and the best of them now operate much like modern e‑banking: fully digital, with clean, intuitive user interfaces. That level of ease of use is increasingly taken for granted.

At the same time, the user base is maturing. More sophisticated operators are entering the AMC market and are demanding more advanced functionality: access to additional exchanges, richer features, and deeper capabilities. Some panelists noted that AMCs risk becoming a commodity product, which is a fair observation, but commoditisation and sophistication can coexist. In practice, it often means that the baseline has risen and that differentiation has shifted further up the value chain – a sign of a market growing up rather than flattening out.

Tom Lyons, GenTwo

The panel “AMC: Making Tailored Investment Strategies Tradable” featured Alberto Turra, Managing Director and AMC Product Owner at Leonteq, Philippe A. Naegeli, Co‑Founder and Chief Executive Officer of GenTwo, Erwin Näscher, Head of Structured Products Sales at Banque Cantonale Vaudoise, and Silvan Räber, Sales Structured Products at Luzerner Kantonalbank, and was moderated by Stefan Wagner, host of the Nalu Finance Podcast and Head of Business Development at vestr.