NewTech Friday: GenTwo – Making all assets bankable, investable and manageable
Philippe Naegeli, Co-Founder & CEO of GenTwo, tells us more about this Swiss-based B2B fintech company that operates globally and expands the investment universe by making all assets investable.
Philippe Naegeli, Co-Founder & CEO of GenTwo, tells us more about this Swiss-based B2B fintech company that operates globally and expands the investment universe by making all assets investable.
What led to the creation of GenTwo?
For many asset managers and investors today, only a limited number of investment options exist. Investors are stuck in the world of traditional, bankable investments and hampered by all kinds of limitations to seek alpha and drive diversification. That’s where our idea originated.
For retail investors, the main choices have been funds or direct investments in the equity or bond markets or other traditional retail banking products. Investing in alternative assets up until now was only possible for ultra-high-net-worth individuals or institutional investors. And even there, access can be difficult, and there is a lot of friction. Things aren’t very easy.
Both of us founders, Patrick and myself, have deep experience in structured products and asset and wealth management. So, we knew the issues firsthand. And that’s when we started to ask ourselves: Does it have to be this complicated? What if we could create an easy-to-use platform and a network to provide anybody with the tools to turn any asset or creative investment strategy into a bankable security? And to do so fully compliant using well-known, standard financial instruments, all without the costs and constraints of the status quo? That’s what we set out to do with GenTwo. To make things easy. Our vision has been and remains to this day to expand the investment universe by making all assets bankable.
Could you present GenTwo’s offer?
Our offering is built on two pillars: our financial engineering platform and our network. Our proprietary platform solution is called GenTwo Pro. With it, investment professionals can easily create tailor-made investment solutions based on dedicated issuers that operate as independent legal entities. This allows for great flexibility and the creation of individual products in a streamlined, efficient, digital way, as we handle most of the process ourselves. All the asset manager has to do is to deliver the idea. You can think of GenTwo Pro as a novel engine for easily creating financial products. In fact, we call ourselves GenTwo because we see our offering as next-generation in this domain.
We’re proud of having created value for over 300 clients and partners in 26 countries in our first five years. They have created over 1,200 investment products through our platform, leading to more than US$3bn assets under service.
We’ve also developed a broad partner network since we believe network access is as important as creating innovative products. This network includes our AssetRush event series, which has become a must-attend event on the Swiss financial services industry calendar over the past few years. AssetRush provides a unique forum for our clients. The stories they present showcase the investment revolution that our platform is catalyzing. We also have a digital assets subsidiary, GenTwo Digital, which helps bridge the gap between traditional and digital assets.
What’s coming next for GenTwo?
We will continue the work of expanding the investment universe by building out our platform and expanding our geographic footprint. Our goal is to expand our geographic footprint in the short- to mid-term. More generally, we are pursuing both a process and a vision that we have come to call Assetization.
Assetization is a combination of ‘asset’ and ‘democratization’. It stands for the great opportunity we see in the ability to make non-bankable assets bankable and unleash financial innovation through our radically simple, efficient and independent engine.
The Assetization opportunity is vast. According to our GenTwo research, some 78 trillion US dollars’ worth of non-bankable assets are waiting to be unleashed. That is fully two-thirds of the already known universe of bankable assets. And our estimates may even be too low.
Our mission is to make it easy to create investment products that free up investors to invest in their beliefs, whatever those may be.
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