Waves, Wrappers and What's Next: AMC Summit at the Halfway Point

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

We're in the middle of our Global AMC Summit Week, and it has already exceeded expectations. Five sessions down and we’ve already had a legal and technical deep dive, a digital assets panel, a market data session, a look at the Americas, and a practitioner's guide to launching.  

Still to come are our AMC Master Class as well as our AMC Creator demo (and, if you are in Zurich, there’s also tomorrow’s AMC Breakfast). If you are interested in any of these, you can still sign up with this link: 

• https://gentwo.com/amc-summit/ 

In the meantime, here is an overview of some of the more interesting themes that we’ve covered so far.

The AMC is no longer a Swiss private banking secret

We've heard this from multiple directions now, but Pablo Conde from SRP put it most directly: the AMC is "moving out of the shadows." For years it was a widely-used but poorly-understood instrument, concentrated in Swiss private banking and external asset management. That's changing. The SRP AMC report — which Pablo walked us through on Tuesday — found practitioners from global banks, independent platforms, technology firms, index providers, and distribution partners all actively shaping the market. The geography has shifted too. Switzerland remains the natural home, but meaningful activity is now happening across continental Europe, the UK, Singapore, and Hong Kong, with Latin America emerging as a particularly interesting frontier.

Fernando Concha from Luma described an appetite in the region that was hard to overstate, and made a compelling case for why: LatAm investors have specific and concrete reasons to want AMCs — from accessing locally-traded assets like Brazilian or Peruvian equities through international accounts, to converting income tax into capital gains in jurisdictions where that distinction matters, to simply being able to hold a strategy inside an existing Merrill Lynch or Pershing account rather than a disconnected offshore fund structure. The AMC, in that context, is solving real problems rather than creating new ones.

The SPV changed everything

Luca Bianchi and Fabio Oertle from ISP both described the shift from on-balance-sheet bank issuance to SPV-based structures as the pivotal moment in the AMC's development. The move eliminated issuer credit risk — the Lehman scenario — and simultaneously unlocked a much wider investment universe. Banks are constrained by risk-weighted assets: they don't want crypto, private equity, or illiquid positions on their balance sheets, and the capital costs make it prohibitive. An SPV carries no such constraint. The result is that AMCs now hold everything from top-20 cryptocurrencies to racehorses to Paraguayan real estate. Whether or not you're interested in the exotic end, the open architecture principle — that an asset manager is no longer tied to a single broker desk or a bank's approved asset list — has been transformative. The AMC didn't just get cheaper and faster in its second wave. It got fundamentally more useful.

The competitive edge has moved from product to infrastructure

This came up in almost every session. Pablo captured it most cleanly, quoting a practitioner who said there is "no real competition anymore on the payoff." The structured note you can build inside an AMC is no longer the differentiating factor. What matters now is the infrastructure behind it — how quickly you can issue, how smoothly you can manage the lifecycle, how well your systems communicate with custodians and investors. Fabio put this in human terms: the typical AMC user is not a large institution but a small to medium-sized professional asset manager with a good strategy, a growing client base, and a real operational problem to solve. The AMC lets them manage one pooled portfolio instead of executing the same trade across fifty separate client accounts — a difference that compounds quickly as a business scales.

The use cases are broader than most people realize

Fernando's taxonomy of four use cases in Latin America was one of the clearest framings we've had all week: strategy wrappers that function like a low-cost mini hedge fund, jurisdiction trackers that make locally-traded assets accessible from international accounts, tax structuring that converts income into capital gains in markets where that matters, and the securitization of non-bankable assets into bankable certificates. Pablo added that across the SRP report, the most consistent finding wasn't one specific exotic use case but "the normalization of complexity" — AMCs are increasingly being used for strategies that would previously have been hard to distribute at scale.

Tokenization: interesting, contested, not yet here

We had a genuine debate about this on Monday night between Florian Marty and Dominic Berger from Sygnum. Florian's view is that tokenising an AMC opens up an entirely new distribution channel among crypto-native platforms and custodians — and that this is not a question of if but when, with all investment solutions eventually trading as tokens. Dominic's concern is liquidity fragmentation — you end up with three competing markets where you previously had one — and his view is that the fundamental infrastructure needs to mature further before complex products like AMCs are truly ready for it. Pablo found a similarly mixed picture across the SRP interviews. The honest answer is that nobody in the room disagreed on the destination — only on the timeline. Watch this space.

As mentioned, we still have three sessions ahead of us: Thursday's GenTwo Masterclass, where our own structuring team will walk through a live case study; Friday morning's AMC Community Breakfast here in Zurich, sponsored by Swissquote; and Friday afternoon's deep dive into the AMC Creator. A full report covering everything will go out to everyone who registered, (hopefully) within two to three weeks of the end of the week. 

https://gentwo.com/amc-summit/ 

Tom Lyons, GenTwo