How To Move From Curator to Creator

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

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 and four here. 

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.

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.

Tom Lyons, GenTwo