The Assetizer · 1 March 2024
"It Will Never Work" – Free download of Chapter 1 of Assetization
Earlier this year, GenTwo's co-founders, Patrick Loepfe and Philippe A. Naegeli, published their first book. In this excerpt, the authors share the pivotal moment at a Zurich event where they introduced GenTwo and the groundbreaking concept that would lead to "Assetization."
Chapter 1 of the book takes us back to a defining moment at an event in Zurich, where Patrick Loepfe and Philippe A. Naegeli unveiled GenTwo and their vision of making all assets bankable through a process they later coined "Assetization". Despite facing skepticism and doubts, this chapter reveals how they embarked on their journey to transform the investment landscape. The excerpt below offers a glimpse into their belief in the idea and their determination to prove its viability. For more, you can download the full chapter as a PDF.
Our Big Night
It was our big night. We were about to be invited up on stage at PurPur, at the time one of Zurich's premier nightclubs, to announce the launch of our new business.
We were more than a bit nervous. The atmosphere in the club, with its lush interiors and velvety decor, was electric. But it was also daunting. It didn't help that the room was filled to bursting with a crowd of our peers from the Swiss financial services community, most of whom were probably not expecting to see us up there that night – and all of whom, we were sure, would be surprised by what we had to say.
We were excited as well, of course. After a year's hard work building the company we called GenTwo, it felt good to be coming out of stealth mode to tell the world what we had been up to. And in hindsight, the setting couldn't have been more appropriate for the launch of a new fintech company.
PurPur was located in the Seefeld area of Zurich, near the lake and the river Limmat. A mere ten minutes by tram would take you to Paradeplatz and the heart of the Swiss financial center. That put us just downstream of the great Swiss banks and the country's long-established financial community, steeped in centuries of tradition and convention.
But being in Seefeld also meant we were close to a tradition of creative disruption. At the end of his life, the great Irish writer James Joyce had lived just around the corner from the club, and was buried in a local cemetery just up the hill. The avantgarde Dada movement had been started in the Cabaret Voltaire cafe, a short walk away. And Carl Jung, the revolutionary Swiss psychologist and psychiatrist, had trained at the Burghölzi clinic just down the lake.
Not that we were putting ourselves in the same league as these giants. But we felt strongly that we were on to something revolutionary in our industry that could potentially have a major impact right around the world. In other words, we knew we would make waves that night. Little did we know how big those waves would turn out to be!
Assetization: The Trillion-Dollar Opportunity
So what were we on to? To sum it up succinctly, we had found a way to radically expand and democratize investing through a new approach to what is known in financial services as securitization (more on that later)...