Setting your ETFs up for growth

An ETF launch is a decision about how a firm is built to launch and scale, and it belongs in the boardroom. Building in-house, partnering with a white-label issuer, and running a hybrid model are all valid paths. What determines which one works is whether leadership decides before launch pressure forces their hand and prices in the trade-offs from the start. The most successful firms keep the platform underneath flexible enough to change course as strategies and markets evolve.
 

Why every asset manager faces the same ETF decision

Global exchange-traded fund (ETF) assets hit a record USD 21.91 trillion at the end of April 2026, up from USD 19.84 trillion at the end of 2025.¹ Active ETFs are the fastest-growing part of that market by a wide margin, and they're pulling assets away from mutual funds at a pace few managers anticipated even three years ago.² At this pace, entering the ETF market is one of the clearest growth opportunities in asset management today. How firms approach the launch decision will determine who actually captures it.

For asset managers, the conclusion is the same no matter which market they look at: an ETF launch is a decision about how the business will operate. It deserves boardroom-level attention, with product, investment, and operations teams in the conversation early, while the strategy is still taking shape.  

The decision hiding inside every ETF launch

Ask a portfolio manager whether the firm can run an ETF strategy, and the honest answer is usually yes. Ask the Chief Operating Officer whether the firm can issue one, and the answer gets a lot harder. Bringing an ETF to market means solving for basket management, portfolio composition file production, intraday net asset value calculation, in-kind subscription and redemption, tracking-error or risk-budget oversight, and corporate actions workflows that behave differently from those in a traditional mutual fund. None of this is exotic, but little of it exists in the technology stack most managers have built for mutual funds and segregated mandates.

This leaves a firm with two options. The first is building the capability in-house: own the management company, the capital-markets relationships, the product roadmap, and the economics that come with them. The second is partnering with a white-label issuer or service provider, trading some economics and control for speed to market and lower operational complexity. Both paths are valid. Both are growing, but increasingly, neither can be treated as an afterthought to be resolved once the product idea is approved. How the firm is set up to issue determines how fast it can launch, how many products it can support once it has one live, and how much of the ETF wrapper's economics it keeps.

Distribution raises its own set of questions, and for many firms they come first. Where will the ETF list? Which platforms, wholesalers, and advisor channels does the wrapper open that a mutual fund doesn't? Unlocking those channels is often the reason a manager enters the ETF market at all, and that makes distribution part of the same decision from the outset.  

What the C-suite should be weighing

Executive committees often discuss an ETF launch the way they’d discuss any new product. In practice, it is more of a build-versus-buy decision about the firm’s core investment platform. Four questions belong in that conversation:

• What does this cost over five years, not five months?  
  Launch costs are visible and budgeted. The recurring cost of a second, parallel platform, a separate reconciliation process, and a team that only understands ETF workflows rarely appear in the same business case, and it compounds with every product added after the first.
• Does the decision get easier or harder to reverse?  
  A path chosen purely for speed today can become the reason a firm can't bring a program in-house later or can't add a service provider without a system replacement. The right choice preserves the option to change approach as the strategy matures.
• Who keeps the economics, and what was traded for it?  
  White-label and full-service models cost basis points of margin in exchange for speed and reduced operational risk. That trade is acceptable if it's priced deliberately, not accepted by default because it was the fastest route to a first product.  
• Does the setup survive difficult market conditions?
  A workaround built on a borrowed spreadsheet and a service provider's goodwill can get one ETF listed. It won’t hold up through a redemption spike or a basket that’s suddenly hard to price. Staying listed is more difficult, as a record 146 US-listed active ETFs were merged or liquidated in 2025.³ 

None of these are direct technology questions. They're questions about capital allocation, risk appetite, and how much operational complexity the firm is willing to carry indefinitely. Once the C-suite has answered them, they have more clarity on whether to build in-house, partner with a white-label issuer, or run a hybrid operating model.

The pattern among managers who get this right

Across the firms making the strongest start on ETFs, the four questions above got answered before the first product was approved, not during the launch. Their core investment data already sits on a single Investment Book of Record (IBOR), so extending it to a new wrapper is an addition to the workflow, rather than a parallel data build. Their choice of how to issue preserves the option to change course later. And the decision is made by the people who decide whether to enter the market at all, not delegated to a project team after the fact.

Several mid-sized and large managers are taking a cautious approach right now. Rather than building capital-markets capability from scratch, many are testing the ETF market through a single white-label partner, often with a defined asset threshold at which they'll reassess bringing the program in-house.

Firms without the discipline to answer those four questions upfront typically won't see the cost coming. They end up running a second, parallel platform alongside their first one, indefinitely, in a way that rarely shows up in the original business case.

Different paths, one platform

This is the vantage point at SimCorp, where clients across the industry are living this decision in real time, and where the way they choose to issue varies far more than the investment platform underneath it. Some clients build active ETF programs entirely in-house on SimCorp One, running the same platform for IBOR, basket management, and portfolio construction that already supports their mutual funds and mandates. Others run portfolio management on SimCorp One and hand the issuance structure and capital markets relationships to a white-label issuer or asset servicer. What we see consistently, regardless of the path chosen, is that the firms with the least friction are the ones whose leadership made this decision early, before launch pressure forced their hand.

The platform decision behind the wrapper

ETFs have become one of the primary vehicles through which asset managers reach investors. Firms must consider whether launching an ETF was a deliberate decision, with eyes open to the trade-offs, rather than discovering halfway through a launch that it needs infrastructure nobody budgeted for, a decision bigger than the current product cycle.  

Derek Whitney, Director at Citisoft ⁴, sees a second reason to get it right:

The capability firms build for ETFs today is the same capability the next wave will demand. Private and alternative strategies are already moving into the wrapper, and tokenized structures are visible on the horizon. Managers who understand the mechanics now can extend them to whatever comes next.

Firms need a platform that grows with their ETF strategy but also stays reliable as business demands evolve and markets change. Oliver Neumann, VP at SimCorp, concludes:  

Every asset manager entering the ETF market has to decide whether to build, partner with a white-label issuer, or run a hybrid model. What doesn't change is the need for a platform that supports ETF construction and daily production under any of those models. SimCorp's place in Deutsche Börse Group also puts us closer to the exchange, clearing, and post-trade infrastructure ETFs depend on.

Footnotes

¹ ETFGI reports new milestone: ETF assets surge to record USD 21.91 trillion worldwide, ETFGI, May 2026.

² Active ETF report, Oliver Wyman, September 2025.

³ Active ETF Launches and Closures: 2025 in Review, Morningstar, February 2026.

⁴ https://www.citisoft.com/insights/blog/etf-evolution