Wave 2: The Containerization of Finance

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 and two here. 

As Assetizer readers will know, at the heart of our new book is a three-wave framework for how investment infrastructure is democratizing. The first wave is the democratization of access to private markets, which has been gaining momentum over the past decade or so.

In this post I want to look at the second wave, which we call the containerization of finance. Here we are talking about the democratization of the tools of financial product creation, and ultimately the whole investment product lifecycle.

Below a short summary of the main ideas.

More on the book here: www.assetizationbook.com.  

The containerization of finance

To explain what's happening, the book reaches for an analogy from a different industry entirely.

In 1956, a trucking entrepreneur named Malcom McLean loaded the first standardized shipping containers onto a converted tanker in Newark, New Jersey. The idea was simple: instead of loading and unloading individual cargo items at every port, everything would travel in identical, interchangeable boxes. It seems obvious in retrospect. At the time it was revolutionary. The container didn't just speed up shipping. It rewired global trade, collapsed costs, and made the modern global economy possible. The key to all of this, as with so many technological revolutions, was standardization.

The financial industry, like most industries, knows well the value of standardization. It long ago invented the security. Whether a stock, a bond, or a certificate, a security is essentially a standardized container for assets. It is a contract that allows a claim on an asset to be bought, sold, and held through a common infrastructure. That standardization is what made modern capital markets possible in the first place.

Standardization and modularization

But while securities have done an incredible amount to standardize finance and enable a globalized financial system, creating securities has remained in what we call a "pre-McLean" state. For most of the industry's history, creating a financial product has been a custom, expensive, and heavily intermediated process. Each project required specialist legal work, regulatory navigation, and the infrastructure of a large institution.  

GenTwo is one of the companies that have come on the scene to fix that: to standardize, modularize, and as far as possible automate the securitization process, with the aim of bringing costs down and opening up the tooling to many more users and for many more use cases.  

We are of course not alone. History has shown us time and again that industries move toward the removal of friction through standardization, modularization, and automation. This one is no different.

Updating the value chain

This pattern has played out in many other areas of finance, and now it is the turn of the process for creating and distributing financial products.

We think that two developments are particularly important.  

First, we are seeing the whole investment industry architecture disaggregating, modularizing, and standardizing. Not just the securitization part, but the distribution part, the valuation part, the custody part, the compliance part, and more.  

Second, with the advent of blockchain and tokenization, a new and potentially much better form of financial wrapper has emerged. Tokens are the financial containers of the future, offering potentially greater standardization, automation, efficiencies, and new kinds of global distribution rails.

What this means in practice

To understand the ramifications of this, it is worth being clear about how Wave 2 differs from Wave 1. Wave 1 has broadened access to private and alternative assets, but it remains intermediated, still largely in the hands of large incumbents as well as some new entrants. In Wave 2, the tools are opened up to users directly, for instance independent asset managers or family offices.

These no longer need to be distributors of other people's products but can become architects of their own. Armed with the right infrastructure, an independent advisor, family office or wealth management team can design, structure, and issue products that precisely fit their clients' needs, without the budget, the balance sheet, or the bureaucracy of a large institution.

We have seen this movie before. The book draws parallels with other industries where the same pattern has already played out. In publishing, standardized digital formats and on-demand printing meant anyone could become a publisher. In e-commerce, payment gateways and fulfillment platforms meant anyone could become a merchant. In technology, cloud computing meant anyone could become a developer. In each case, standardization and modularization turned a vertically integrated privilege into an open toolkit. Finance is next.

That is what Wave 2 amounts to. And it in turn lays the groundwork for something even more radical: the automation and disintermediation of the entire product lifecycle. That is what we call Wave 3. If Wave 2 is about opening up the toolkit, Wave 3 is about what happens when the toolkit starts running itself. More on that next time.

Tom Lyons
GenTwo