Infrastructure, Access and Surviving AI: Takeaways From This Year’s AssetRush

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

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.

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.