Bernie: In 2003, I was in a meeting with Deutsche Bank, which was launching X-Trackers – now Europe's third-largest ETF provider. They asked us to calculate Portfolio Composition Files for them. Afterwards, my colleague Giles turned to me and said, “Do you actually know what an ETF is?” I had to confess I didn't. But two weeks later I did, and I was completely hooked on ETFs. European investors were seriously missing out on what the US had already built with the SPYs, QQQs and Diamonds – and I resolved to spend my career changing that.
Bernie: It is. Being inside an asset manager gave me a vantage point I'd never had before. I could see that ETF data wasn't being structured correctly – the whole industry had built its architecture around indices, treating every share class as a separate instrument. But ETFs don't work that way. Umbrellas, promoters, multiple share classes, different currencies – none of that was being accounted for. I built a prototype database at Invesco to show what the right structure could look like. That became the blueprint for Ultumus. That database is still used inside Invesco to this day.
I pitched the concept to Graham Tuckwell, founder of ETF Securities. Within half an hour he'd written me a cheque – Dragon's Den style. The idea was compelling enough that a major US bank, who'd been my client at two previous firms, signed up before we even had a product. We launched in 2016 and haven't looked back.
Bernie: They used to be inseparable. You can't have a passive ETF without an index behind it – the index is the blueprint for the basket, the standard against which the portfolio is measured, the reference point that keeps the whole creation-redemption mechanism honest. If the index data is wrong or badly structured, everything downstream is compromised.
From the beginning, what we were building was an infrastructure for the entire index and ETF data ecosystem – not just the ETF wrapper but the index construction, the reference data, the benchmarks. That remains central to what we do. We now have over 4M indices running through our platform and the quality of that underlying index data is what makes the rest of the value chain work.
Bernie: Once you’re handling the composition data every day, the quality of the data coming from custodians wasn’t up to the standard we needed. Custodians were built to look at the index and ETF at the close of each day – they weren’t oriented towards forward-looking data for that day’s trading and settlement. Because we had focused on index data for trading, we had everything we needed to solve that. We were also fortunate to bring in Alison Holmes, an industry veteran, who joined us and helped grow the business from there.
The Portfolio Composition File is the document that tells authorised participants exactly what basket to deliver or receive when they're creating or redeeming ETF shares. Getting it right is not a nice-to-have, it directly affects how accurately an ETF prices, how tight the bid-offer spreads are, and ultimately how well the whole primary market functions. We're now the largest independent PCF calculation agent in the market, and I'm very proud of that.
Marion: SIX and Ultumus developed a successful commercial partnership where SIX Financial Information and Ultumus worked together to create a new service in the SIX Financial Information sanctioned securities offering. Discovering and managing sanctioned securities within an ETF wrapper adds a whole new level of complexity, and the experts at SIX and Ultumus co-created an offering to enable clients to manage the increasingly complex world of sanctions in the operationally complex world of ETFs.
What I can say is that the ETF agenda at SIX had moved firmly to the centre of our strategy. We were already operating exchanges in Switzerland and Spain. We had SIX Indices. We had post-trade infrastructure across over 50 markets. But the connective tissue – the data and operational layer that makes the full ETF lifecycle work – that's where we needed specialist capability that we couldn't build from scratch as quickly as the market demanded.
Ultumus was doing something we couldn't easily replicate: purpose-built ETF and index data management, earned client relationships, and genuine domain expertise that had been tested in production every day for years.
Marion: The depth of knowledge was the first thing – and that includes the index side, not just the ETF side. When you're trying to build an end-to-end ETF proposition, you need a partner who understands how the pieces fit together from index construction all the way through to creation and redemption. Bernie and the team had that understanding at a level that's rare.
The second thing was the client base and the reputation – recognition earned through consistent, reliable delivery, day in and day out. In this industry, that kind of standing is built slowly and lost quickly.
SIX is long on expertise and data nerdiness, focuses on operational intricacies rather than sales pitches, and works closely with clients on data needs. Culturally it felt like a natural fit, we both loved the deep data needs of ETFs and the challenges of data management.
From a client perspective, we trusted Bernie and his reputation in the market. His passion for data and solving customer problems, combined with his deep data expertise, made our two organisations a great fit.
And then there's the cultural question, which people in M&A often underestimate. We weren't acquiring a business to absorb it. We wanted a team that would keep building. The conversations with Bernie made it clear that the team's ambition and ours pointed in the same direction.
Bernie: I'd sold a company before, so I wasn't naive about what it means. You spend years building something, and the question you have to be honest with yourself about is: does this make the thing you've built more powerful, or does it dilute it?
With SIX, the answer was clear. We had a compelling product, a loyal client base, and a vision to become the preeminent backbone of the global index and ETF industry. What we didn't have was the institutional weight to move as fast as the opportunity demanded. The financial due diligence alone – the hoops a startup has to jump through before an enterprise client will commit – was slowing us down in ways that had nothing to do with the quality of what we were building. SIX solved that problem on day one.
The question wasn't whether the vision was right – it was how to achieve it most effectively. SIX had relationships, gravitas, reputation and scale that would have taken us a decade to build independently. When the strategic logic is that clear, the decision becomes easier.
Bernie: The single biggest practical change is client onboarding. When you're a standalone fintech, potential clients – particularly large banks and asset managers – have to put you through rigorous financial, technical and operational due diligence before they'll commit. That process can take months and is a real barrier, particularly when you're still relatively new. Since joining SIX, clients can tick those boxes quickly. We've acquired significantly more clients as a result.
Beyond that, we're working increasingly closely with the SIX sales team, our technology team has helped build out the SIX bulk API, and we've supported SIX on ETF data delivery. We service ETFs listed and traded on the SIX Swiss Exchange, which listed its first ETF back in 2000.
Marion: There are innovations that have been created that were not even part of the original business case or initial scope, such as the ETF Order Management System. Bernie and the team are constantly alive to the evolving world of ETFs and data management and continue to solve customer problems. It is great that the Ultumus team are just as innovative and customer-responsive as they were before we met. I like to think SIX enables Ultumus to continue their innovation and solutions-driven mindset.
The launch of ETF OMS in 2023 is a significant marker. It's Ultumus' ETF Order Management System, the automated lifecycle management platform for primary market ETF activity, including daily PCF calculations. It's the piece that completes the loop in the SIX ETF value chain and represents something neither organisation could have delivered on its own at that speed.
What I'm genuinely proud of is that the Ultumus team have remained intact. That's not accidental. When you acquire a specialist business, the expertise and the reputation are the point – and both of those live in the people. Bernie still leads the business, the team that built it is still building it, and the clients know it.
Bernie: We want ETF OMS to become the global standard for PCFs and the creation-redemption process. That's not a modest ambition, but the foundation is already there.
Outside the US, primary market infrastructure is still largely manual: email chains, spreadsheets, bilateral phone calls to manage what should be automated. That fragmentation has a real cost – wider bid-offer spreads, operational risk, and artificially early cut-off times that eat into trading capacity every day. European ETF assets hit $3.22 trillion at the end of 2025. The volumes are there. The infrastructure needs to catch up. One of our clients has already traded over $7BN year to date across our platform and the numbers keep going up.
ETF OMS solves this through a shared network. We already have 35+ APs, issuers and fund servicing agents connected, with over $70 billion in notional traded through the platform. The chicken-and-egg problem that kills most network businesses is already behind us.
Active ETFs are accelerating the need further. Active managers update portfolios in real time, PCFs need to follow intraday, not just at day end. For that to work at scale, smart API automation isn't optional. It's the infrastructure the industry needs to grow into what it's becoming.
Bernie: I've been working with some of these people for over twenty years across three companies. They didn't have to come back – they chose to, because they believe in what we're building, either that or we all suffer from the same delusion. That's the culture: a genuine shared conviction about where the ETF and index industry needs to go, and a team that's been trying to get it there together for a long time.
That shapes everything, including how we grow. Singapore in 2019, Hawaii shortly after. Those decisions followed both the market opportunity and the people. Hawaii turned out to be the perfect timezone to bridge US market close and pre-Australia open. When you trust your team, those kinds of moves make themselves. The opening of our Hong Kong office is further evidence of that momentum.
We're also bringing in fresh graduates and training them from scratch, teaching them not just how to use the technology, but how to think about the ecosystem. The industry needs that depth. We want to build it.
Marion: It is a trusted, two-way partnership. SIX values Ultumus and the specialist contribution that they bring in ETFs. The innovation, the proximity to clients, the solutions mindset, the agility and the deep data expertise – are all assets that SIX supports and enables. ETFs feature in the services that SIX offers clients right across the spectrum – trading, post-trade and data – and Ultumus powers ETFs with specialist, dedicated services, having access to the deep data coverage of SIX Financial Information and benefitting from the trusted reputation SIX has as a partner for financial institutions worldwide. SIX provides the means with which Ultumus is able to go deep in ETF service provision worldwide.
Bernie: Starting a company looks glamorous from the outside. Nobody tells you that you’ll spend most of your time on HR, legal and finance – everything except the thing you actually love. It always takes twice as long and costs three times as much. But ten years in, with a team that handles the things I find boring and a product that’s becoming what I always believed it could be, it’s becoming fun again.
The lesson I'd give to anyone starting out: specificity is a competitive advantage. The pressure to broaden – to cover all asset classes, to build for every fund type, to be a platform for everyone – is relentless. We built for ETFs and indices, not “all funds.” We went deep enough to actually understand the problem before we started scaling the solution. That focus is what made it possible to solve something real rather than something approximate.
Marion: Understand what you're acquiring before you acquire it. The value in a specialist business is often invisible to a generalist eye – it's in the domain knowledge, the client trust, the reputation that's been built call by call and delivery by delivery. The job of the acquirer is to understand that value well enough to protect it. Get that right and the rest follows.
Bernie Thurston founded Ultumus in 2016. SIX acquired Ultumus in 2021, bringing together SIX's global financial market infrastructure – exchanges, indices, data and post-trade capabilities – with Ultumus' specialist ETF and index data expertise, PCF calculation services, and the ETF OMS creation and redemption platform. Together, they form an end-to-end proposition covering the complete ETF value chain.