Who Really Creates a Financial Product? Rethinking How ETFs Are Built and Managed

How bank-branded ETFs and white-label platforms are reshaping the division of functions, economics, and responsibilities in asset management.

European banks and financial platforms are increasingly entering the market for ETFs under their own brands. According to the Financial Times, UniCredit, Commerzbank, Santander, ING, and others have launched ETFs or are preparing to enter the market. Assets under management in the European ETF market reached approximately €3.25 trillion at the end of September 2026. One straightforward interpretation is that banks are seeking to participate in this growing market and capture a portion of the fees that have traditionally flowed to third-party asset managers.

Banks Are Not Necessarily Becoming ETF Asset Managers

However, when I look more closely at who actually creates and operates these products, I see a somewhat different picture.

UniCredit's onemarkets ETFs carry the bank's brand and are distributed through its retail, private banking, and wealth management channels, among others. Yet portfolio management has been delegated to BNP Paribas Asset Management. Amundi has also introduced an ETF white-label offering called "ETF-as-a-Service," through which clients can combine the functions they need—including product design, portfolio management, capital markets support, operations, compliance, and listing—to launch ETFs under their own brands.

A bank or financial platform does not necessarily need to perform every function in-house to offer an ETF. The institution that develops the product concept, the entity responsible for fund governance and regulatory compliance, the portfolio manager, the parties supporting ETF creation and redemption and secondary-market liquidity, and the institutions responsible for branding and distribution may all be different.

An ETF is not a finished product simply because a fund has been legally established and listed on an exchange. Its characteristics as an investment product also depend on how creation and redemption function after listing, how market participants interact, and how secondary-market liquidity develops.

Within the JAMP Group, JAMP Fund Management Co., Ltd. provides ETF White-Label Services in Japan as an investment trust management company. Through our involvement in this business, I am constantly reminded how difficult it is to attribute the creation of an ETF to a single company.

An asset manager with an investment strategy, JAMP Fund Management as the investment trust management company and ETF platform provider, a trust bank, the exchange, market makers, and firms supporting investor communications and market development all contribute different expertise and assume different responsibilities. Only through their combined efforts can an ETF function in the market.

From this perspective, the developments in Europe seem less like banks becoming asset managers and more like a change in how financial products are manufactured: functions that were once viewed as belonging to a single institution are increasingly being separated and organized across multiple participants.

Why Product-Level Profitability Does Not Tell the Whole Story

Of course, putting a bank's brand on an ETF does not mean it can easily compete with established ETF providers.

The European ETF market remains highly concentrated. According to LSEG Lipper data for the end of September 2026, iShares accounted for approximately 41% of assets under management, while the 10 largest ETF providers together accounted for more than 90%. Of the 2,663 ETFs counted at the portfolio level, only 568 had accumulated more than €1 billion in assets.

Even if the barriers to launching an ETF decline, the barriers to building a successful ETF business do not disappear. Asset scale, index-tracking quality, creation and redemption processes, relationships with market makers, trading liquidity, and brand recognition all continue to matter.

Nevertheless, I believe we need to distinguish between two different levels of profitability to understand why banks may find it economically rational to offer their own ETFs: the profit and loss of the individual product, and the profitability of the broader customer relationship.

A low-cost ETF may generate relatively little management fee revenue on its own. However, incorporating a bank-branded ETF into regular investment plans, advisory services, or model portfolios may create value beyond the ETF itself by helping the bank strengthen its long-term client relationships and retain a greater share of its clients' investment assets.

This remains a hypothesis, however. Having access to customers does not automatically translate into ETF asset gathering. Favoring proprietary products can also create conflicts of interest. Controlling the distribution shelf is not the same as offering a good investment product.

Shared ETF Platforms Change More Than Costs

The ETF white-label platform business itself is far from easy.

Goldman Sachs wound down its ETF Accelerator platform despite substantial investment in personnel and systems. Citi's Velocity ETF platform adopted a comparatively asset-light model that relied extensively on external providers, yet it too was discontinued less than a year after its launch. The ability to share infrastructure among multiple clients does not necessarily mean that the platform business itself can attract enough clients to become profitable.

Even so, I believe these developments are significant. My experience with ETF White-Label Services has led me to think that the value of shared infrastructure extends beyond reducing costs.

When an ETF manufacturing and operating platform becomes sufficiently standardized and can be used repeatedly by multiple participants, institutions that previously found it difficult to maintain all the necessary ETF functions in-house gain new options. They may be able to take the lead in product concepts, investment strategies, or branding without having to build the entire infrastructure themselves.

In that sense, a shared platform reduces more than fixed costs. It may also lower an industry-level barrier to entry by changing who is able to initiate and lead the development of a financial product.

Japan's Financial Services Agency (FSA) published its Progress Report 2026 for Advancing Asset Management Services in Japan in July 2026. The report does not, of course, address the ETF strategies of European banks. However, it highlights the need to promote the consolidation of administrative functions and an appropriate division of responsibilities among industry participants, so that asset managers can devote greater attention to investment management.

In JAMP Perspective No. 344, distributed on August 5, 2026, I discussed the report from the perspective of what functions asset management companies should retain in-house. This time, I would like to approach the same issue from the opposite direction: as shared infrastructure becomes more developed, which institutions that previously had limited ability to lead product development might now be able to assume that role?

The Question Is Not What to Own, but What to Govern

Horizontal specialization may not simply be the opposite of vertical integration. Precisely because specialized functions can be separated and obtained from external providers, another institution may be able to bring those functions together again to deliver a coherent proposition to customers.

Outsourcing, however, does not eliminate responsibility. A bank that owns the brand, a fund management company or ManCo, an investment manager, and a distributor each have distinct legal, regulatory, and contractual roles. As the division of functions becomes more extensive, the selection and oversight of service providers, product governance, and management of conflicts of interest become increasingly important.

Seen this way, the question for Japan is not whether banks should establish their own asset management companies or whether Japan needs more bank-branded ETFs.

The more fundamental questions are what an institution should own, which decisions it should lead, which specialized functions it should obtain from the market, and what it should govern and take responsibility for within its own role.

Shared infrastructure changes more than the cost of manufacturing financial products. I believe the competitiveness of financial institutions will increasingly depend not on how many functions they own, but on their ability to identify the functions through which they should differentiate themselves, combine internal and external expertise into customer value, and fulfill the responsibilities that come with their chosen role.

Author: Keiichi Ohara, President & CEO, JAMP Corporation
About This Article 
This article is an adapted English edition of JAMP Perspective No. 355, originally written in Japanese by Keiichi Ohara and distributed on October 21. It has been edited and supplemented where necessary to make the discussion and its Japan-specific context clearer to readers outside Japan. It is therefore not a direct translation of the original Japanese newsletter.

This article is provided for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice or a recommendation regarding any financial product.