Why AMC Adoption is Growing: View From SRP Europe

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

Two weeks ago I was in London, along with our CEO Philippe and our UK team, for SRP Europe. One of the big themes this year was the actively managed certificate, or AMC. Assetizer readers will know that AMCs are a big topic in assetization and also at GenTwo.

A major takeaway from the event was the growing adoption. AMCs have been around for decades, but it seems that they are really coming into their own now. In this post I want to give some evidence of this.

But before that, some advertising of my own: as I mentioned last week, I am moderating GenTwo’s Global AMC Summit the week after next. If you haven’t yet, you can sign up for one or all of the sessions here: gentwo.com/amc-summit.

Driving Innovation

First off, a quick reminder: an AMC, or actively managed certificate, is a kind of structured product in which you wrap the performance of an investment strategy in a debt instrument which you can then issue as a bankable certificate. What makes them interesting is that they can be used to create investment products that are very much like mutual funds, but at a fraction of the cost and a fraction of the time — we're talking weeks to launch versus six months or more for a traditional fund.

It's not hard to see how that would make them real important for innovation: you can pack almost anything into them and do it fairly easily. Think of them as flat-pack funds — all the components you need, assembled faster and cheaper, without the warehouse. They're a genuine swiss-army knife instrument and their moment has arrived.

Increasing Visibility

For years AMCs were seen as a niche structured product, mostly used by Swiss private banks to create bespoke investment products for UHNWIs.  This year they were a significant part not only of the SRP Europe programming. SRP also published a report on the subject, which I believe was a first for them. You can get it here. It’s worth reading: SRP AMC Report 2026.  

Here’s what we learned regarding adoption.

The market is growing rapidly

There still aren’t any hard numbers on the size of the AMC market (though we have been doing some research in this area I hope to be able to share soon). Estimates vary wildly depending on how you define an AMC. In the SRP Europe report, Orpheus Capital's Andrew Wolfson puts the global figure at around US$1.6 trillion. Based on what we're seeing, that's certainly plausible. What is almost for sure is that the market is growing rapidly.

The number and type of providers keep growing.  

It used to be primarily a Swiss bank story — UBS, Julius Baer, the cantonal banks. Now the ecosystem is much more diverse. You have the major banks still very much in the game, but alongside them a whole new layer of independent issuance platforms, infrastructure and paying agent providers, specialist tech platforms, index providers, distribution partners, and advisory firms — all building businesses around AMCs.  

Geographic reach is expanding fast.  

For a long time this was predominantly a Swiss phenomenon, with Luxembourg as a secondary hub. Now we see real acceleration in the Middle East, Singapore, Hong Kong, Germany, France and the UK. Latin America is starting to come online too — there are firms actively building out AMC distribution there right now. Multiple people I spoke to at SRP Europe flagged Asia as the fastest-growing region at the moment. The Swiss DNA is still very much there, but this is becoming a genuinely global instrument.

The use cases keep expanding.  

AMCs used to be a convenient wrapper for liquid assets — equities, ETFs, that kind of thing. But the flexibility of the format means the underlying universe has stretched dramatically. Today you see AMCs wrapping equities, bonds, futures, options, private equity, private debt, real estate, carbon credits, crypto, and DeFi strategies. The SRP report even features a pig farming AMC and an esports/Web3 venture — which tells you something about how far people are pushing the format.  

Interesting is that it's not just about underlyings. People are increasingly using AMCs as a way to test product ideas in live market conditions — launch quickly, run with limited capital, see if there's demand, and maybe migrate to a full fund later if it works. Many end up not bothering. As iMAPS founder Andreas Wölfl puts it in the SRP report: “most of them [issuers of AMCs for proof of concept reasons] stick to the AMC. Once it is there, it has the track record and the acceptance. The AMC ends up doing everything they need.”

The technology is improving rapidly and that is changing the economics.  

Platforms, automation, lifecycle management — all of this has moved fast in the last few years. One data point that stuck with me: the time required to manage an AMC has reportedly fallen from around 80 hours to approximately 2 hours on some platforms. Launch timelines that used to take six weeks now take one. And the minimum viable size has come down dramatically — there are AMCs running today with under CHF 1 million in assets, which simply wasn't feasible a few years ago. The competitive battleground has shifted: as one practitioner in the SRP report puts it, "there's no real competition anymore on the payoff — it's about technology and lifecycle management." That's a meaningful shift.

A Tool for Our Times

All of this bodes well for the instrument. From an assetization perspective this matters because AMCs are a tool of financial innovation well matched to the moment. On the investor side, active management and personalization are increasingly in demand. On the issuer side, providers are looking for tools for mass customization, efficiency increase, and the ability to craft custom offerings at scale.  

Mayer Brown's Patrick Scholl put it like this in the SRP report: AMCs are becoming "a permanent feature of the structured products landscape — provided the industry accepts that transparency and regulation are not obstacles to growth, but its foundations."  

Couldn’t agree more.  

Tom Lyons, GenTwo