SRP has been the structured products industry's leading data and content provider for over twenty years. When it published its first dedicated report on the AMC market in 2026, that decision was itself a signal: a product that had been growing quietly in the background for two decades had finally reached the scale and complexity to demand its own coverage. In the AMC Summit's market session, SRP's Pablo Conde walked through what the research found — and what it couldn't find. The session covers the definitions problem that makes the market almost impossible to measure, the structural shift from product design to infrastructure as the new competitive frontier, the expanding universe of strategies AMCs now carry, and where Conde and his team think the market will be in three years.
Pablo Conde is Director of Content at SRP.
03·01A market that doesn't report on itself
Pablo Conde is in charge of content for the structured products industry's leading data and content provider, and the researcher behind its first dedicated report on the AMC market. That puts him in a unique position to comment on the state of the AMC industry — no mean feat.
As Conde describes it, SRP's goal was to shed light on what has to date been a rather hidden and fragmented part of the structured products universe. AMCs are not a new product — they have been circulating in Swiss private banking for two decades — but the last four or five years have brought increased activity, new players, and a generation of fintech companies entering the space. Nobody had yet tried to map it comprehensively, and the reason, Conde says, is that mapping it is genuinely difficult.
The challenge starts with size. Estimates of the global AMC market range, according to Conde, from roughly $1.6 trillion at the top end down to figures an order of magnitude smaller, depending on who is counting and what they are counting. Conde is clear that this variance is not primarily a measurement problem. It is a definitions problem — and the definitions problem is itself one of the most revealing things about where the market currently stands.
Different participants use the word "AMC" to describe meaningfully different products. Some count only listed, actively managed certificates. Others extend the definition to structured notes with discretionary overlays, or to platform-based wrapper solutions. In Germany, equivalent products are sometimes called actively managed products — AMPs — which widens the universe further. The result is that participants across the value chain are often, in effect, talking about different markets while using the same word.
03·02What the opacity costs
Beneath the definitions problem lies something more structural: the AMC market generates almost no public reporting. The quarterly earnings disclosures of the major investment banks' equity derivatives divisions contain no mention of AMCs. The activity is real, substantial, and growing — and essentially invisible to anyone outside the ecosystem.
Conde says the transparency question produces a particular dynamic in interviews. On the record, sources tend to be guarded. Off the record, the conversations are more direct: practitioners are adamant that the industry needs to be more transparent, and that the current fragmentation will eventually create a problem.
The off-the-record view is clearly that more upfront disclosure around AMCs is needed. It will just take time for everyone to align on that.Pablo Conde
The history of structured products offers a cautionary reference. Regulators don't like opacity, and lack of transparency has been used before to cast a bad light on markets that might otherwise have developed cleaner reputations. Practitioners in the AMC space appear to understand the risk — the question is how long alignment takes.
03·03From private bank to ecosystem
Whatever the precise scale of the market, its composition is not in dispute. The AMC has moved well beyond its origins in Swiss private banking. SRP's research reached global investment banks, regional issuers, independent structuring platforms, index firms, technology providers, and distribution specialists across multiple continents. Switzerland, Conde says, remains the core — its private banking tradition, regulatory openness, and tolerance for non-standard underlyings keep it at the center of the story. But it is no longer the whole story.
The structural consequence of this expansion is a disaggregation of the value chain. Where a major bank once handled issuance, structuring, administration, and distribution as a vertically integrated offering, these functions are increasingly distributed across specialists. Dedicated infrastructure platforms have lowered barriers to entry. Hybrid models are emerging, with large institutions using external platforms for specific functions while retaining core capabilities in-house.
Geography and distribution have also decoupled. A product issued in Zurich can be sold in Dubai or Singapore. Cross-border capability, Conde says, is now one of the most important things a technology platform can offer.
03·04The competition has moved
One finding from SRP's practitioner interviews stands out above the others for what it says about the market's maturity. Across the conversations Conde conducted for the report, a consistent view emerged: structuring ever more sophisticated payoffs is no longer the primary differentiator in the AMC market.
There is no real competition anymore on the payoff. AMCs are becoming increasingly infrastructure-driven rather than payoff-driven.Pablo Conde
The edge now lies in the infrastructure behind the product: technology platforms, automated lifecycle management, real-time reporting, operational scalability. These capabilities were difficult to provide even a few years ago. They are now the primary competitive battlefield — and increasingly, Conde suggests, the baseline expectation rather than a differentiator. In most industries, that shift signals maturity. A market competes on product design when product design is hard. When it becomes routine, the competition moves to execution.
03·05A wrapper for almost anything
What an AMC can hold has become nearly as elastic as the question of what counts as an AMC. Conde describes the breadth of strategies and asset classes SRP encountered in its research as the finding in itself, rather than any single strategy.
What began as a wrapper for simple equity strategies now encompasses cross-asset and thematic allocations, derivatives-based approaches, and strategies built around assets — private equity, private debt, real estate, carbon credits, art — that would previously have been difficult to distribute in a standardized, scalable format. SRP publishes a monthly roundup of AMC product launches; Conde notes that every month produces something unexpected. The conversation touched on eSports, peak farming, uranium, and pre-IPO structures as examples from across the industry.
AMCs are becoming a delivery mechanism for a much broader set of investment ideas than the original definition would suggest — ideas that would previously have been harder to distribute in a scalable or standardised way.Pablo Conde
The fastest growth in SRP's data is concentrated in strategies where the AMC provides distribution efficiency: systematic equity approaches, income-oriented strategies, and index-adjacent allocations with scope for active adjustment. The exotic end generates attention; systematic strategies drive volume.
For smaller or newer managers, the AMC also functions as a proof-of-concept vehicle — a way to build a live track record with real capital at a fraction of the time and cost of a fund launch. For larger institutions, it is less a stepping stone and more a permanent channel, running alongside fund and structured product ranges rather than replacing them.
03·06Flexibility and governance
One tension surfaces consistently in SRP's research: between the flexibility that makes AMCs attractive and the governance expectations that flexibility creates. Active management means something different from buying an ETF, and the question of how to frame that difference clearly — for investors and regulators alike — without constraining the discretion that is the product's core value, runs through almost every practitioner conversation Conde had.
The answer practitioners consistently give is not to limit flexibility but to institutionalize it. Clearer investment mandates. Well-defined guidelines around rebalancing frequency and asset scope. Strong governance structures around decision-making. Transparent product documentation that tells investors how often and under what conditions their underlying exposure may change. In that framing, flexibility and governance are not in tension — they are complementary properties of a well-designed product.
Regulatory engagement is moving in the same direction. France launched a consultation on AMC structures in 2025. Singapore is reportedly examining the product category. Conde reads this not as hostility but as regulators catching up with a market that moved faster than the frameworks around it.
Regulation is no longer presented as a barrier — it's more of a framework that needs to be developed and gradually improved to enable adoption as the market matures.Pablo Conde
The retail dimension is already moving. In Switzerland, AMCs can now be purchased for as little as a thousand francs — the product is no longer exclusively a private banking instrument. The infrastructure to support retail access — Key Information Documents, suitability frameworks — is increasingly in place across Switzerland, Germany, and parts of Europe with strong self-directed investor bases.
03·07Tokenization: exploratory, but in the conversation
On tokenization, Conde's research produced a genuinely mixed picture — which, he notes, is itself informative about where things stand.
One camp of practitioners views tokenization as a natural extension of the trends already reshaping the market: greater automation, better transparency, and potentially fractionalised access that would bring AMC exposure to smaller investors. In this framing, it also addresses one of the longstanding criticisms of structured products — that once you are in, you are locked in for three to five years. Secondary market platforms are already emerging in the US for structured products more broadly, and lifecycle management tools could eventually change the liquidity profile of AMCs in a similar way.
The other camp is more cautious. Regulatory clarity is still developing. Distribution infrastructure on the investor side remains limited. And demand from investors themselves, rather than enthusiasm from issuers and platforms, is the precondition that practitioners say needs to be in place before the infrastructure becomes meaningful.
Conde's summary: tokenization is still largely exploratory within the AMC ecosystem. It is not yet a core driver of market structure, but it is increasingly part of the strategic conversation — particularly among technology-led platforms whose business model positions them to move early if and when conditions align.
03·08Three years out
Conde put the three-year question to his full team, given how collectively the SRP report was produced. Their answer came in three parts.
First, technology will move from differentiator to baseline. Automated rebalancing, integrated risk monitoring, real-time reporting — what is currently described as a competitive edge will simply be expected of any AMC issuer. Second, the line between active and systematic strategies will blur further. The AMC world will absorb more quantitative and rules-based approaches, in the same way that ETFs have converged with active management. Third, the market structure will evolve toward standardization in operations and reporting while remaining productively fragmented in strategy design and distribution models.
Underpinning all three, Conde argues, is a single precondition: transparency. More consistent data, clearer definitions, and agreed reporting standards would allow the industry to demonstrate its scale, its utility, and its governance — not just to regulators, but to the allocators and distributors whose confidence the market needs to sustain its growth. A market measured in the trillions that currently produces almost no public data is not a sustainable condition. The question is not whether that changes but when.