We spoke to Ben Slavin of BNY this week in a proper ‘state of the nation’ wide ranging conversation that elaborated on the successes and challenges facing our industry. We go into this year with an extraordinary set of figures for asset growth over 2025, plus the first month of this year. As Slavin says, the US data for ETFs for just a few weeks in early March saw a spike in the percentage of volume on a notional basis that was traded on US exchanges crossing 40 per cent of the total volume of US trades.
“This means that for every USD10 traded on the US exchanges in total, at least USD4 was in ETFs,” Slavin says.
Challenges abound, not least in the new ETFs as a share class function in the US, with Slavin explaining that the issues lie with the distributers, with Slavin noting that they need to be able to service at scale and in an automated fashion. There are also challenges for marketmakers and authorised participants in servicing such a wide range of new products.
“The question is will there be a limit or stumbling blocks to bringing new products to market because of the ability of the liquidity providers to support them, seed them and provide liquidity to all these products if we continue to see growth at this pace,” Slavin says. “I will tell you in dealing with hundreds of products we have not heard or seen any impact yet of clients saying: ‘We want to bring these new ETFs but I can’t find a marketmaker or get seed capital’.” Slavin says.
We are still celebrating our winners in this year’s European ETF awards, with the publication of our Special Report, featuring interviews with our winners including: HANetf; Jane Street; J.P. Morgan Asset Management; Leverage Shares; State Street and STOXX.
Read our interviews for yourselves in the report PDF here.
We encourage you to vote in our Canadian ETF awards for issuers and service providers in the Canadian ETF industry.
Finally, I am very pleased to be back chairing two ETF panels at IMPower Fund Forum again this summer and will be visiting with our new head of business development, Simon Holloway. Come and find us. And, using this link, I can offer you a 10 per cent discount on the attendance.
Beverly Chandler, Managing Editor
For live updates please follow us on Twitterand LinkedIn.
