The Three Waves of Assetization

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

Assetizer readers might recall that I wrote a post announcing that we had signed a deal with Wiley to publish a second, expanded edition of Assetization.

Having now sent the draft off to the publisher, I thought it a good time to give a heads up as to its contents. A lot has changed in the assetization world.

A Broader Vision

When we wrote the first edition, we focused heavily on the friction of securitization. We wanted to show how new tools could unlock non-bankable assets. But since then, we have come to realize that our original thesis was too narrow. "Assetization" is not just about accessing non-bankable assets. It is a deeper shift in how the machinery of finance works beneath the surface: who can create products, which assets can be brought into portfolios, and how easily ideas can become investable exposures.  

This revolution matters, greatly. For investors, it promises portfolios that reach far beyond the shrinking universe of listed securities. For advisors and wealth managers, it offers a way out of the middleman squeeze and a path from curator to creator. For institutions, it is an invitation to rewire how they serve clients and retain assets.  

Let’s take a look. 

The Waves of Change 

In the book we describe this phenomenon in terms of three overlapping waves.

Wave 1: The Democratization of Access

Wave 1 is what we call the democratization of access. For generations, most investors have been confined to public markets—stocks, bonds, mutual funds, ETFs—and have had to settle for whatever products the industry chose to put on the shelf. Over roughly the past decade, that has begun to change. Barriers to private markets and alternatives have started to come down. New marketplaces, digital platforms, and DIY tools have made it easier to reach assets that were previously reserved for large institutions, from private equity and venture capital to cryptocurrencies and collectibles. The old seller’s market, where big manufacturers decided what existed, has started to give way to a buyer’s market defined by lower costs and much greater choice. That is progress—but it is incomplete. In this world, investors and advisors are still reliant on the products the traditional sellers create.

Wave 2: The Containerization of Finance

The second wave is the democratization of creation, which we describe in terms of the containerization of finance. Here the story shifts from “what can I access?” to “who gets to build the products in the first place?”

Thanks to new technologies, innovative legal and structural approaches, and the disaggregation of the product value chain, it is becoming much easier to create and issue financial products across a wide range of assets, and to do so without relying on a handful of large banks with massive product factories. As a result of this, control begins to move outward—from centralized issuers to independent financial advisors, wealth managers, multi-family offices, and other professionals who sit closer to the end investor.  

For these players, this wave is about using new infrastructure to design solutions that truly fit their clients rather than forcing clients into generic molds, and about competing on insight and customization instead of distributing the same shelf as everyone else. At the same time, it opens the door to entire categories of assets that barely touch today’s public markets, unlocking what we argue is a generation-defining opportunity measured in the tens or even hundreds of trillions.

Wave 3: Radical Automation

The third wave pushes this logic to its endpoint: radical automation. In this world, generating an idea for a product, researching it, structuring it, issuing it, and managing its lifecycle are no longer slow, manual, and heavily intermediated processes, but services delivered almost immediately through AI agents connected to vast platforms and data repositories. It will be like “vibe coding” for finance: a “prompt-to-product" world where you specify what you want to achieve, and the infrastructure does the rest.  

We think marketing and distribution will also become automated, with digital marketplaces connecting those who have ideas or exposures to sell with investors worldwide. At that point, the distinction between buy side and sell side begins to blur, as those traditionally on the buy side can also move over to the sell side if they so wish.  

Invest in what you believe  

Why does any of this matter in practical terms?  

For investors, our message is straightforward: you no longer have to settle for portfolios built only from what happens to be on the shelf. As these waves advance, more of the world’s real economy becomes investable, and more of what you know and believe can be reflected directly in the assets you own.  

For independent advisors, assetization offers a way to escape the constraints of today’s product shelf and use new tools to design truly client-specific solutions, strengthening relationships and defending their businesses in a changing industry. For institutions and wealth management firms, it is a chance to bring these capabilities inside, so that they can meet clients where they are going instead of asking them to accept where the infrastructure happens to be.  

The three waves are simply a way of naming and structuring this transformation: access, creation, and automation. Together, they describe a new phase in the evolution of financial infrastructure—one in which the ability to turn almost anything of value into an investable product is no longer the exception, but the norm. 

Pre-Order Your Copy of “Assetization: Inside the Trillion-Dollar Investing Revolution” 

Tom Lyons, GenTwo