Launching an AMC looks straightforward from the outside — a fast, flexible instrument that can be set up in days. The reality involves more moving parts, and the details matter. Fabio Oertle has been in the AMC market since its earliest days and has overseen more than 2,500 product launches at ISP Group. In this session he covers the full picture: how the market evolved from bank balance-sheet issuance to the SPV model that now defines the industry, who actually uses AMCs and what drives them to launch, and what the process of taking an investment idea to a live, tradable security looks like step by step. He also goes into less familiar territory — what it takes to put genuinely exotic underlyings into an AMC, from private equity to art to racehorses — and closes with a candid read on where the market actually stands today on crypto, tokenization, and AI-driven strategies.
Fabio Oertle is Head of Capital Markets and a Member of the Executive Board at ISP Group, a broadly diversified investment boutique headquartered in Zurich with offices in Geneva, Tel Aviv, Dubai, and Hong Kong. ISP operates across wealth management, asset management, fund placement, and brokerage — but at its center sits a large and long-running AMC business. The firm currently services around $12 to $13 billion in AMC assets across more than 2,500 products launched over eight years, making it one of Switzerland's most active players in the space.
06·01Two waves
Oertle traces his own introduction to AMCs to their first wave — the early 2000s, when Swiss banks issued the instruments directly off their balance sheets. He worked at UBS and Bank Vontobel during that period, and the criticisms he encountered were consistent: counterparty risk, since an AMC issued off a bank's balance sheet exposed investors to that bank's default, and high trading fees, since the product was necessarily tied to the bank's proprietary execution infrastructure.
Those two critiques, he argues, essentially triggered the second wave — the emergence of the SPV model, which ISP was among the first to adopt roughly seven to eight years ago. The shift addressed both problems directly. Issuing out of a dedicated special purpose vehicle eliminates issuer risk entirely: no Lehman scenario. And because the SPV is not a bank, it is not bound to proprietary brokers. But the more significant consequence of the SPV shift, Oertle says, was the expansion of the investment universe. Banks face capital costs for holding exotic or illiquid assets on their balance sheets — risk-weighted assets make such positions genuinely expensive to carry. In an SPV, none of those considerations apply, which opened the door to private equity, private debt, real estate, crypto, and a range of other asset classes that simply were not accessible under the old model.
Moving the issuer from a bank to an SPV massively expanded the investment universe. Banks are generally limited to bankable assets because of the capital cost of holding anything more exotic on a balance sheet. In an SPV, none of those considerations apply.Fabio Oertle, ISP Group
06·02Who the AMC is actually for
ISP's client base is broad, but Oertle's shorthand for the typical AMC user is a small to medium-sized professional asset manager — external asset managers, independent managers, family offices, smaller banks. What drives them to launch is not always a single moment; many of ISP's clients have been running AMCs for close to a decade. But there are recurring trigger points. One is market timing: an asset manager spots a trend they want to capture quickly, and the AMC's fast time to market — days to weeks, versus months for a fund — makes it the natural choice. The other is scale. A manager with 50 or 100 high-net-worth clients, and more knocking at the door, starts to find that managing each relationship individually is becoming unworkable. Consolidating into an AMC saves both time and cost.
The comparison with a fund comes up often. Oertle's view is straightforward: below $100 million, with a client base that is not specifically targeting institutional investors accustomed to Luxembourg fund structures, the AMC is almost always the better answer. It is faster, carries a lower fixed cost base, and can be launched at seed sizes of one to two million. Above $100 million, with a specifically institutional distribution target, the fund conversation becomes worth having.
The idea of using an AMC as a proof-of-concept vehicle — launch it, build a track record, migrate to a fund once it hits scale — is common among new launchers, he notes. In practice, many choose to stay with the AMC. Not primarily because reaching the AUM threshold is hard, but because asset managers become genuinely comfortable with the AMC and stop wanting to switch.
06·03Step by step
To make the launch process concrete, the session runs through it as a client walkthrough. The starting point is a consultation: strategy description, initial feasibility check, and a first discussion of the investor base. From there, ISP works with the manager on structure — product type, SPV jurisdiction, and a pricing model tailored to the specific setup. Documentation follows: a term sheet and a management agreement, which is the formal authorization for the manager to act on the SPV's assets. ISP then runs the product through internal review, drawing in progressively more senior people depending on the strategy's risk profile, up to executive board level if needed. Once approved, the ISIN is set up and the product is loaded onto the relevant systems: Bloomberg, Telekurs, ISP's core banking platform, and mySwissAMC.ch, the client portal that gives managers real-time visibility into their holdings, execution prices, and reporting.
In the best case, this process takes a matter of days. A realistic conservative target, accounting for back-and-forth and external dependencies, is two to three weeks. The external dependencies — regulatory approvals in certain jurisdictions, broker onboarding — are the one category that ISP cannot accelerate, and Oertle flags them as the most common source of delay outside the manager's control.
Onboarding checks cover three things: the firm's licence to manage an AMC, the managers' individual qualifications and track record, and the plausibility of the strategy itself. AML compliance sits alongside all of that as a non-negotiable.
06·04Into the exotic
The bankable universe — equities, bonds, ETFs, futures, structured products — is well-understood. The more interesting question is what the SPV model enables beyond it. ISP's list of exotic AMC underlyings includes private equity, private debt, real estate, racehorses, art, luxury watches, and wine. The largest category by volume is private equity, followed by private debt and private market funds. The very exotic — horses, art, watches — has not grown dramatically, Oertle says, but the broader trend toward private market instruments is clear and continuing.
The additional complexity of exotic underlyings is substantial, and Oertle walks through it using a hypothetical art portfolio. The due diligence process must verify ownership of the pieces, confirm authenticity through external experts, and establish that proper registered storage is in place. Any asset sitting in a living room rather than a qualified storage facility is a non-starter. Valuation is the central ongoing challenge: exotic AMCs require an independent third-party valuator to produce assessments that feed into the NAV. For private equity with a five-to-ten-year exit horizon, that might mean two, three, or four valuation events over the life of the product — triggered by significant transactions or formal independent assessments from firms like PwC or KPMG. Investors need to understand upfront that the NAV will only update when a new valuation is available. Transparency makes the arrangement workable; ambiguity does not.
06·05The hardest part
Asked what first-time AMC launchers most consistently underestimate, Oertle does not hesitate: raising money. A well-built strategy and the ability to fund an AMC are two entirely different things, and the gap between them trips up a disproportionate number of new entrants, particularly smaller or unregulated managers with sophisticated quantitative models but limited investor networks. ISP does have a structure for working with unregulated managers — the firm can act as the regulated asset manager while the unregulated party serves as investment advisor, sending recommended trades that ISP reviews before execution. But even with that structure in place, the investor access challenge remains.
On the question of how precisely to define a strategy in the term sheet, Oertle's advice reflects hard experience. Specificity gives investors confidence in what they are buying; too much specificity constrains the manager's ability to respond to changing conditions. The right balance is a term sheet that is clear enough to orient investors, general enough to preserve room to maneuver, and never so specific that a sensible rebalancing decision could be construed as a breach.
06·06Market trends: crypto, tokenization, and AI
Oertle's read on the current state of crypto AMCs is candid. There was, for a period, strong narrative momentum around institutional adoption of crypto strategies — and ISP has invested significantly in digital asset custody and brokerage in anticipation of it. But the actual volume of crypto AMC demand, he says, has not matched the conversation around it. Cycles play a role, and he remains a believer in the space. But for now, it is generating less volume than the rhetoric might suggest.
On tokenization, his view tracks the broader market: theoretically compelling, practically slow. ISP is positioned to launch tokenized products and is watching adoption develop. A generational dimension is part of the explanation — familiarity and comfort with the technology is still unevenly distributed. His expectation is that it becomes a significant part of the business in time; currently it is a small one.
AI is already present. ISP has asset managers actively using AI to determine investment strategy and rebalancing decisions within their AMCs, and more are joining that group. What Oertle finds more interesting is the regional variation in how it is used. Swiss managers, he observes, tend to want to remain visibly in control — there is a strong cultural preference for the manager being able to explain any decision to a client. In Hong Kong and across Asia more broadly, ISP sees significantly more openness to fully rules-based or third-party-managed strategies, where the manager's role is more oversight than active judgment. Both approaches use AMCs heavily. They use them differently.