- SMART combines FINMA-regulated asset management, a statutory-grade issuing vehicle, and a fully integrated partner ecosystem into a single offering.
- No licence is required from the promotor. Onvest acts as FINMA-regulated Product Manager by default, or the promotor may appoint any other FINMA-regulated manager of their choice - in either case, full regulatory coverage is in place.
- The full infrastructure is pre-assembled: there is no regulatory approval to obtain, no Product Manager to source, and no operational gap to close before launch.
- Every SMART product carries a Swiss ISIN, settles through SIX SIS, and is managed by a FINMA-regulated asset manager or a foreign regulated entity under a comparable oversight framework.
- The promotor has genuine freedom of counterparty choice, with no embedded margins and full pass-through of volume discounts generated across the SMART product family.
- Every product is issued through a legally segregated cell of Smart Edge PCC Limited: the investor's claim is against ring-fenced collateral, not against any bank balance sheet.
- NAV is independently calculated and reportable from the first day of trading, building a verifiable, custody-confirmed track record from launch.
- AMC, Tracker Certificate, and CLN are all supported: any asset class, any strategy, any maturity, through a single platform.
- The platform is economically viable from a first close, with no AUM threshold required to justify the fixed cost structure.
- The full technology stack, including API connectivity, live NAV, pricing notifications, always up-to-date factsheets, and a portfolio allocator, is built in.
The Promotor's Dilemma
Any asset manager, family office, entrepreneur, or strategy developer who wants to bring an idea to external investors faces the same structural problem: the investment thesis and the infrastructure required to distribute it are completely separate challenges.
The strategy might be proven, the investor demand evident, and the commercial case clear - but without a regulated issuing vehicle, a compliant product wrapper, a custody-connected settlement chain, a calculation agent, and a distribution infrastructure, none of that matters. Ideas do not raise capital. Products do.
The gap between having an idea and having a live, institutional-grade product is wider than most promotors expect. It is not a single obstacle - it is a sequence of them, each locked behind the one before. The regulatory question must be resolved before the legal framework can be finalised. The legal framework must be finalised before the issuance vehicle can be set up. The issuance vehicle must exist before a Swiss ISIN can be applied for. The ISIN must exist before a prime broker will open an account. Each party has its own onboarding requirements and its own contractual framework. The calendar slips, the budget expands, and the window closes. Many promotors with genuinely compelling strategies never launch - not because the idea is wrong, but because the infrastructure overhead is prohibitive relative to AUM at inception. The fixed cost of solving this from scratch is the same whether the first close is CHF 500,000 or CHF 50 million.
The SMART platform was built to eliminate that overhead entirely. Every component a promotor needs - regulatory coverage, issuance vehicle, prime brokerage, legal framework, calculation, and reporting - is pre-assembled and available from day one. The promotor's job is the strategy and the investors. Everything else is already built.
SMART is powered by the GenTwo first-class structuring platform. On top of this foundation, Onvest provides an additional technology layer and direct, first-class client contact at every stage - from initial structuring through to live product management. The result is a platform that does not ask the promotor to choose between speed, regulatory quality, and structural protection: it delivers all three simultaneously, because every component is owned, integrated, and managed by Onvest rather than outsourced to separate parties the promotor must coordinate.
What the Market Offers Instead
When a promotor evaluates alternatives to the SMART platform, four routes exist. Each is established and has genuine use cases - but none combines all of the components a promotor actually needs to get from idea to live, bankable product.
A regulated fund (Swiss SICAV, limited partnership, or Cayman fund) provides the gold standard of investor protection. It also costs in excess of CHF 100,000 in legal and setup fees, requires 12 to 18 months of FINMA review, and demands annual running costs of often more than CHF 250,000 for fund administration, auditing, regulatory costs and depositary services. Below CHF 100 million in target AUM, the cost structure is often simply unviable.
A structured product issued by a bank provides a Swiss ISIN and SIX settlement - typically in exchange for a minimum notional starting at CHF 3,000,000, a five-digit structuring fee, and a management fee arrangement in which the bank retains a fixed share of the economics. The product must use the bank's own trading facilities and is subject to the fees the bank imposes, forgoing the free choice of counterparties and locking the promotor into the full ecosystem of the issuing bank. Critically, the investor bears the issuing bank's counterparty risk directly.
A white-label AMC platform provides an issuing vehicle and ISIN, but stops there. There is often no single-counterparty service relationship, no transparent all-in cost structure, and no platform team managing the operational ecosystem on the promotor's behalf. The technology layer is typically absent or basic, and the true cost - once every missing component is added - is substantially higher than the platform fee alone suggests.
A managed account produces no transferable security, carries no Swiss ISIN, and cannot settle through SIX SIS. It cannot be reported as a single line item on a custody statement, and reaching more than one investor requires a separate bilateral agreement for each. The promotor bears the full regulatory burden of the client relationship directly. It creates no verifiable, independently custodied track record - making it effectively invisible to any future investor who asks for one.
Twelve Reasons SMART Is the Clear Choice
Any investment product structure must be compliant with Swiss financial market legislation - and every route to market therefore requires a FINMA-regulated asset manager in some form.
A regulated fund requires a FINMA-licensed fund management company. A white-label AMC platform requires either the promotor itself to hold a FINMA licence or to separately source and pay for a FINMA-regulated Product Manager. The same regulatory requirement applies to a managed account structure.
The SMART platform is fully compliant with Swiss financial market legislation from day one. Onvest is a FINMA-regulated asset manager and may act as Product Manager. Alternatively, the promotor may appoint any other FINMA-regulated manager of their choice. The promotor contributes the strategy and retains the full economics.
There is no licence application to file, no compliance infrastructure to build, and no ongoing regulatory burden to carry. The SMART structure handles all of that - cleanly, from the outset.
A regulated fund carries substantial setup costs in legal fees, FINMA filing, and documentation, plus ongoing expenditure for administration, depositary services, and audit - fixed costs independent of AUM and payable before the first basis point of management fee is earned.
A white-label platform presents its platform fee as the cost of entry but stops short of the full stack: a regulated Product Manager must be sourced and budgeted for separately, and legal counsel, prime brokerage, and calculation agent typically fall outside the platform fee entirely.
A managed account carries its own overhead: the promotor must either hold a FINMA licence or engage an outsourced asset manager, adding a recurring cost layer that grows with each mandate.
The SMART platform covers every component - SPV, ISIN, regulated PM, calculation agent, and reporting - in a single all-in fee. No separate line items emerge after onboarding, no third parties need to be contracted independently, and no costs are deferred to a point at which the promotor is already committed. The total cost of operating on the SMART platform is a fraction of what any alternative route costs once all components are honestly accounted for.
Beyond direct infrastructure costs, the SMART platform removes the compliance overhead that every other route requires the promotor to carry independently. For unregulated promotors, there is no compliance infrastructure to build. For those who already hold a licence, the benefit is equally significant: by wrapping a strategy into a SMART product, every investor becomes a holder of a structured note rather than a direct client. The number of regulatory relationships - each carrying its own KYC, AML, suitability, and reporting obligations - collapses to one. For promotors who have previously managed a fund or a book of managed accounts, the cost reduction is immediate and material.
Because the full SMART infrastructure is pre-assembled and available from day one, there is no regulatory approval to obtain, no Product Manager to source, and no operational gap to close before the clock starts. Every component, from the issuing vehicle and Swiss ISIN to the calculation agent and reporting infrastructure, is already in place when the promotor arrives.
The promotor's job is the strategy and the investors. Everything else is already built. When a market window opens or a committed investor is ready to move, the platform moves at that pace, not at the pace of infrastructure procurement.
On the SMART platform, the promotor has free choice of prime broker and execution venue, with no captive counterparty relationship and no embedded institutional margin on the execution layer.
Beyond counterparty freedom, every SMART product trades under a single institutional umbrella that aggregates volume across the entire SMART family. The broker-tier discounts generated by that collective scale are passed through in full, at 100%, directly into each product. No Onvest margin is retained on rebates. A promotor with a product of any size benefits from institutional-grade execution costs from day one, regardless of their individual trading volume.
A bank-issued structured product locks the promotor into the issuing bank's own trading facilities, approved underlying list, and full operational ecosystem. The promotor cannot choose a different prime broker, cannot access instruments outside the bank's approved universe, and is subject to the fees the bank imposes at every level of the trade.
White-label platforms often operate under preferential agreements with specific brokers or execution venues, creating a similar dynamic: the platform benefits from those arrangements, but the promotor's choice of counterparty is constrained in practice, and the economic terms of those relationships are not always fully transparent.
On the SMART platform, the promotor has genuine freedom of counterparty choice. There are no preferential agreements that constrain execution to specific venues, no approved underlying list, and no embedded margin benefiting the platform at the promotor's expense. The promotor selects the prime broker and execution venue that best suits the strategy and the cost structure, without that decision being shaped by platform-level commercial relationships.
Where volume discounts are generated through the collective scale of the SMART product family, they are passed through in full to the product, with full transparency on every rebate applied.
A regulated fund issues units rather than a listed security - distribution is limited to platforms and channels that support the specific fund structure, often with no Swiss ISIN and no SIX SIS settlement chain.
A white-label AMC platform may provide a Swiss ISIN, but the regulatory and legal substance behind the product varies. The asset manager responsible for the product is not always Swiss or FINMA-regulated, and the depth of the track record depends entirely on how the platform is set up.
A managed account produces no Swiss ISIN, no independently custodied position, and no verifiable track record that can be shown to a future investor or audited by a third party.
Every SMART product carries a Swiss ISIN and settles through SIX SIS.
The platform is operated by a FINMA-regulated Swiss asset manager, and the product is issued through Smart Edge PCC Limited - a structure fully recognised by Swiss market infrastructure. The regulatory and legal substance behind every SMART product is consistent, auditable, and Swiss-anchored from issuance through to maturity.
For a promotor building a track record, this matters as much as it does for the investor. The NAV history is independently calculated, the product is on-chain within SIX SIS from day one, and the performance is attributable to a specific, identifiable instrument - not to a manager's internal account. That is the foundation on which future investor conversations are built.
On the SMART platform, every product is issued through a dedicated cell of Smart Edge PCC Limited - a Guernsey Protected Cell Company.
The assets of each cell are legally segregated from every other cell and from the company's general estate by statute. The investor's claim is against ring-fenced collateral, not against any bank balance sheet.
A regulated fund carries a fixed annual cost base - administration, depositary, audit, and regulatory reporting - entirely independent of AUM. Below a meaningful scale threshold, these costs consume the entire economic margin before a basis point of management fee reaches the promotor.
A bank issuer imposes minimum notionals and fee-sharing arrangements that permanently dilute the promotor's economics - from the first product issued to the last.
A managed account avoids product infrastructure costs but carries its own viability burden: the regulatory and compliance overhead of managing client relationships directly scales with every investor added, making it equally unviable as a scalable business model.
The SMART platform carries a minimum annual fee that defines the effective entry point - but that entry point is a fraction of the AUM at which a regulated fund, a bank-issued product, or a managed account structure becomes economically viable. The platform fee covers the full cost stack: there is no separate administration bill, no depositary charge, and no minimum notional to satisfy before issuance can proceed.
A promotor with a compelling strategy can launch with an initial tranche - a first investor or a seed allocation - and grow the product from there. The structure is in place from day one; additional investors are added to an existing, live instrument rather than waiting until the economics justify building the infrastructure. As AUM grows, so does the margin - without the compounding overhead that makes every alternative route progressively harder to justify at inception.
A regulated fund typically involves multiple service providers - administrator, depositary, auditor, legal counsel - each a separate relationship with no single party accountable for the whole.
A white-label AMC platform may leave the promotor to source and coordinate several components independently, with no guaranteed single point of contact across the full stack.
A managed account structure has no shared product infrastructure, and the promotor may have no central counterparty to turn to as the number of investors grows.
On the SMART platform, the promotor has a single point of contact for the entire product lifecycle - from initial structuring through issuance, ongoing management, NAV publication, and investor reporting. Every question, every operational request, and every change goes through one team that has been involved from the very beginning.
Onvest is that counterparty: accountable, accessible, and responsible for everything beyond the promotor's own strategy. There is no handoff between departments, no re-explaining the product structure to a new team, and no ambiguity about who owns what. One relationship. One number to call. One team that knows the product from day one.
Building a track record that institutional investors can verify requires more than good performance. It requires a structure in which that performance is independently custodied, independently calculated, and independently reportable. A managed account produces no transferable security and no independently custodied performance history: the record exists only in the manager's own books. Without a Swiss ISIN, there is no custody statement, no standardised NAV history, and no clean audit trail that a future investor or allocator can verify.
Every SMART product's NAV is independently calculated and reportable from the first day of trading. The performance history appears as a custody-confirmed line item on the investor's statement alongside equities and bonds, creating a verifiable, institutionally credible record that accumulates from the moment the product is live. For a promotor building a business around external capital, that track record is not optional: it is the foundation of every future investor conversation.
Most alternatives are focused on the financial and legal setup of the product. Once the ISIN is issued, the tools needed to operate the strategy, communicate with investors, and run the product as a business are left to the promotor to source independently.
A regulated fund relies on the fund administrator's back-office infrastructure. A bank issuer provides a standard factsheet. A white-label platform typically offers basic NAV reporting and little else. API access and execution connectivity exist through the prime broker in any structure - but the expertise to implement, configure, and support those connections is rarely offered by the issuer or platform, leaving the promotor to navigate the technical setup alone.
A managed account has no shared product infrastructure at all, and no counterparty with the knowledge or mandate to help the promotor build one.
The SMART platform goes well beyond the structuring of the product. The operational technology layer covers two distinct dimensions - execution connectivity and investor reporting - each of which is typically absent or basic in any alternative setup.
On the execution side, API access is provided through the prime broker - as with any brokerage relationship. What sets SMART apart is the technical depth Onvest brings to that connection. Onvest works directly with quantitative and systematic promotors to configure and support API-driven strategies, providing active technical collaboration rather than a standard helpdesk.
On the reporting side, Onvest has built an investor-facing infrastructure that goes well beyond what alternatives typically offer - including real-time NAV reporting, live price and performance notifications, and always up-to-date product factsheets with full performance history. The platform also includes a built-in allocator tool that allows investors to simulate how an allocation to the promotor's product interacts with their existing portfolio of external instruments - a capability that no standard fund factsheet, bank portal, or white-label platform provides. It is a reporting and engagement environment designed to let promotors present their product at a level of depth and interactivity that most alternative structures simply cannot match.
SMART vs Alternatives: The Full Comparison
The table below compares the SMART platform directly against the four real alternatives available to a promotor, using actual market numbers. Every figure is a realistic market estimate based on publicly available information and standard Swiss market practice.
| Dimension | SMART Platform | Regulated Fund (SICAV / LP) | Bank Issuer | White-Label AMC Platform | Managed Account |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Timing | |||||
| Time to market | 4 to 8 weeks | 12 to 18 months | 4 to 12 weeks | 4 to 12 weeks | A few days |
| Cost | |||||
| Setup cost | CHF 5,000–8,000 | CHF 100,000+ | CHF 5,000–20,000 | CHF 5,000–10,000 | Low |
| Minimum annual fee | CHF 7,000–10,000 | CHF 250,000+ | CHF 5,000–20,000 | CHF 5,000–10,000 | Low |
| Structuring fee | 40 bps p.a. | N/A | 30–50 bps p.a. | 20–50 bps p.a. | N/A |
| Life Cycle Management fee | 10 bps p.a. | Included in fund admin | 10–20 bps p.a. | 10–20 bps p.a. | N/A |
| Discretionary Asset Management | 25 bps p.a. (if Onvest appointed) | Included in fund management | 20–50 bps p.a. | 20–50 bps p.a. | 50–75 bps p.a. |
| Total AUM-based fees | 50–75 bps p.a. | Included in TER | 60–120 bps p.a. | 50–120 bps p.a. | 50–75 bps p.a. |
| Trading cost | Low | Medium | High | Medium | Medium |
| External regulatory cost | Low | High | Low | Low | Medium |
| Minimum viable notional | Low | High | Medium | Medium | Low |
| Regulation | |||||
| FINMA regulation included | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | No |
| Licence required from promotor | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Structure & Settlement | |||||
| Swiss ISIN + SIX SIS settlement | Yes | Via transfer agent (fund units, not ISIN) | Maybe | Maybe | No |
| Asset segregation | Statutory - PCC legislation | Statutory - depositary | No | Statutory PCC cell or contractual | None |
| Issuer Risk | No | No | Yes | Maybe | N/A |
| Underlying universe | Unrestricted (liquid + illiquid) | Broad but fund-type dependent | Bank's approved list only | Liquid standard; illiquid maybe | Unrestricted (bilateral) |
| Product types | AMC + Tracker + CLN | Fund units only | AMC + Tracker | AMC primarily | Managed accounts |
| Operations & Technology | |||||
| Integrated partner ecosystem | Yes | No | Maybe | Maybe | No |
| API Support | Yes | No | Maybe | Maybe | Yes |
| Live NAV Updates | Yes | Maybe | Maybe | Maybe | No |
| Pricing Notifications | Yes | No | Maybe | No | No |
| Product Factsheets | Yes | Yes | Yes | Maybe | No |
| Portfolio Allocator Tool | Yes | No | No | No | No |
* An AMC requires a FINMA-regulated asset manager. For a CLN or Tracker, a FINMA-regulated asset manager may not be required depending on the structure and distribution approach.
For Whom SMART Is the Obvious Choice
The SMART platform is not the right answer for every structure. A pension fund launching a FINMA-regulated multi-billion franc SICAV will go through the fund route, as the regulatory recognition and investor protections of a collective investment scheme may outweigh the speed and cost advantages of the SMART platform. But for everyone else, the case is close to decisive.
Asset Managers and Portfolio Managers
A FINMA-regulated or foreign-regulated asset manager with a proven strategy who wants to offer it to external investors as a bankable, ISIN-listed instrument, without fund registration overhead, without a new legal entity, and without a six-month setup process. The AMC format provides all of the investment flexibility of a managed account with the distribution reach of a listed security.
Strategy Developers and Quant Traders
A systematic, quantitative, or algorithmic trader who has a proven edge and wants to make it accessible to external capital - but who is not a regulated asset manager and does not want to become one. The SMART Strategy Developer structure allows the intellectual property owner to licence the methodology to the SMART Product Manager, who manages the portfolio and takes regulatory responsibility. The developer retains the economics and the attribution of the track record.
Family Offices
A family office consolidating a complex mandate - across liquid equities, private equity, real estate, and alternative assets - into a single, bankable, transferable instrument. The SMART AMC with a Smart Edge PCC cell allows the full complexity of a multi-asset, multi-liquidity mandate to be wrapped into one Swiss ISIN, providing clean reporting, simplified estate planning, and the ability to transfer the instrument in the normal way.
Entrepreneurs and Project Promotors
An entrepreneur raising capital for a real estate development, infrastructure project, or business venture via a Credit-Linked Note or structured AMC. The SMART CLN provides a professional, bankable, institutional-grade capital-raising instrument without the cost or delay of a fund. The issuing structure via Smart Edge PCC provides statutory ring-fencing of the project collateral from day one, giving investors the protection they require and the promotor the credibility that the SMART regulatory and legal framework provides.
Fund Managers Seeking Faster Distribution
An established fund manager who wants to offer a strategy to Swiss investors without the delay of Swiss fund recognition or the cost of a parallel fund setup. A SMART AMC mirrors the fund's investment mandate, issues within weeks, carries a Swiss ISIN, and can be distributed through any SIX-connected bank in Switzerland - serving the Swiss market immediately, without waiting for regulatory approval of the fund itself.
Anyone Who Has Evaluated the Alternatives
The most persuasive argument for SMART is the experience of promotors who have run the comparison in detail. Those who have approached a Swiss bank issuer and discovered that they will lose 30 to 50 percent of their management economics and cede control over rebalancing. Those who have begun the process with another AMC platform and realised they still need to separately source, contract, and budget for a regulated Product Manager before a single product can be issued. Those who have costed a SICAV and found that the setup alone exceeds their first year's management fee. They arrive at the same conclusion: the SMART platform is not the most convenient option. For any strategy below the scale that justifies a full fund infrastructure build, it is the only economically rational one.