Switzerland’s structured products industry just posted its strongest first quarter on record. For UK investors and advisers accustomed to funds and ETFs, the question is no longer whether Swiss innovation matters — it’s whether they can access it.
The Swiss Structured Products Association (SSPA) reported CHF 79 billion in turnover for the first quarter of 2026, up 27% year-on-year and 25% above the previous quarter. Full-year 2025 turnover hit CHF 235 billion, an 18% increase on 2024. The association now counts 53 members across the value chain. By any measure, the Swiss structured products ecosystem is accelerating.
Yet for most UK-based investors and wealth managers, this market remains largely invisible. That is starting to change — and the Actively Managed Certificate, or AMC, is one of the reasons why.
What Is an AMC, and Why Should UK Investors Care?
An Actively Managed Certificate is a structured product that behaves, in many respects, like a fund — but is issued as a debt security by a bank. The issuing bank (typically a cantonal or investment bank) holds the underlying assets, whilst an external asset manager makes the investment decisions. The result is a product that can be created faster, cheaper, and with far more thematic flexibility than a traditional UCITS or AIF.
Where a conventional fund might take six to twelve months to launch and require substantial infrastructure, an AMC can be brought to market in weeks. This makes it ideally suited to niche strategies — cause-specific impact investing, thematic equity baskets, systematic trading approaches — that would struggle to justify the overhead of a full fund structure.
For the asset manager, the AMC model separates investment skill from operational burden. The issuing bank handles custody, settlement, and regulatory reporting. The manager focuses on managing money according to a defined mandate. For the investor, the product carries the credit risk of the issuing bank rather than a fund’s NAV risk — a distinction that matters, and one that demands careful consideration of issuer quality.
A Market Built on Infrastructure, Not Hype
Switzerland’s dominance in structured products is not accidental. It reflects decades of investment in market infrastructure — from SIX Swiss Exchange’s dedicated structured products segment to the SSPA’s standardised product classification framework (the Swiss Derivative Map). The 2025 launch of the SSPA Benchmark Index, the first of its kind globally, allows structured products to be compared against equities and bonds on a like-for-like basis.
This infrastructure creates a virtuous cycle. Issuers can innovate quickly. Distributors can classify and compare products. Investors can access transparent pricing and standardised terminology. The CHF 79 billion quarterly figure is not just trading volume — it represents a mature, well-governed market that has solved many of the transparency problems that still dog structured products in other jurisdictions.
Reverse convertibles remain the bestselling category, accounting for CHF 20 billion in Q1 alone. But the growth of AMCs — particularly those with thematic or impact-oriented mandates — reflects a broader shift. Managers are increasingly using the AMC wrapper to offer strategies that would be impractical or too expensive to deliver through traditional fund structures.
Crossing the Channel: BFSA and CCI
For Swiss firms looking to serve UK clients, two regulatory pathways are now in play. The Berne Financial Services Agreement (BFSA), effective since January 2026, allows FINIG-licensed Swiss asset managers to serve UK wholesale and institutional clients — those with £2 million or more in net assets — without separate FCA authorisation. This is the faster route, and the one most immediately relevant to AMC distributors targeting professional investors.
The retail route is more complex. The UK’s new Consumer Composite Investments (CCI) regime, which came into force on 6 April 2026, replaces the old PRIIPs and UCITS disclosure frameworks. The FCA has explicitly confirmed that CCI applies to overseas firms promoting products to UK consumers. An AMC distributed to UK retail investors would almost certainly be classified as a CCI, triggering disclosure obligations around costs, risks, and up to ten years of historical performance data.
The transition period runs until 8 June 2027. But the direction is clear: any Swiss manager with ambitions to reach UK retail must build CCI-compliant disclosures, adopt plain-language communication standards, and demonstrate alignment with the FCA’s Consumer Duty framework. This is a significant operational undertaking for overseas product manufacturers — but it is also a quality filter that could ultimately strengthen trust in cross-border products.
What Comes Next
The combination of a booming Swiss structured products market, the BFSA’s wholesale access corridor, and the CCI regime’s retail disclosure framework creates a genuine opportunity for cross-border product distribution. But it demands rigour. UK advisers and investors deserve clear, comparable information about what they are buying, who is issuing it, and what risks they are taking.
The structured products conversation in the UK has been dominated for too long by memories of Lehman-era complexity and opacity. Switzerland’s modern AMC ecosystem tells a different story: one of flexibility, speed, and increasingly, purpose-driven investing. The infrastructure is there. The regulatory bridges are being built. The question now is which firms will be first to cross them.
Swiss structured products turnover data from the SSPA quarterly industry report, 26 May 2026. CCI regime details from the FCA and Akin Gump’s March–April 2026 EU-UK Regulatory Round-up.
