Invest In Your Beliefs: The End Game of Assetization

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, four, five, six and seven here.

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.

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.

Tom Lyons, GenTwo