SRP Americas 2025: structured ETFs – efficiency, exposure and outcome

At Blackrock, Zamkovsky focuses on the defined outcome ETF suite, prior to which he oversaw the investment manager’s indexed annuity business. Before that, Zamkovsky worked in the structured products space at Barclays, among others in cross-asset investable index strategies (QIS) in OTC and listed wrappers.

The worlds of structured products, annuities and ETFs are coming together rapidly - Igor Zamkovsky

Blackrock has a business of outcome ETFs its working on globally.

“These are ETFs that seek to offer protection or income and growth and rhyme quite a bit with the structured products space […] often used alongside notes and annuities,” said Zamkovsky.

_{Igor Zamkovsky during his keynote address at the Fairmont Scottsdale Princess, Arizona on 16 September 2025}

Blackrock has a business in retail insurance, where Blackrock ETFs and indices of ETFs are used in fixed indexed annuities, registered index-linked annuities (Rila’s) and variable annuity products, among others.

A significant amount of the company’s ETFs and some indices are also used as underlyings for structured notes.

“The worlds of structured products, annuities and ETFs are coming together rapidly and as an advisor, distributor or product manufacturer, you have to understand the related products more than ever,” he said.

“None of these products will have a monopoly on the right to win. They all have different benefits and considerations,” said Zamkovsky, adding that participants in this ecosystem, need to operate with a broader perspective than ever to be effective going forward.

Insatiable demand

According to Zamkovsky, ETF flows, annuity flows, and structured note flows are all at all-time highs.

Twenty-five percent of the ETF industry’s net new base fee revenue is from outcome ETFs - Igor Zamkovsky

“There's insatiable demand for protected accumulation and guaranteed and diversifying income sources which all the categories are benefiting from.

“Given this broad product availability, all the products will have to continue to focus on significant consumer value to have a right to win,” he said.  

Zamkovsky shared an anecdote from the time he was covering insurance companies at Blackrock, when the company was launching its buffer ETFs.

“I called most of the largest Rila issuers to give them a heads up and the reaction, surprising to me, but maybe not to you, was universally positive.”

The feedback was the increased awareness would outweigh the potential competitive headwinds, particularly for those who were very confident in the value proposition of their product offering.

“Given how the market has developed since that initial call, I think their reaction was justified.”

At iShares, the first index strategy was launched by a predecessor firm in 1973, and the first ETF was launched in 1993.

Since then, the company has been “innovating constantly”, in areas like international and emerging markets, asset allocation and thematics.

“In each case, the innovation was opening up access to new markets that have been harder to access historically,” said Zamkovsky.

During the past 10 years, the ETF industry in the US has increased five-fold to over US$10 trillion in assets at the end of 2024, “actually it's over over US$12 trillion today”, with approximately 2,500 more ETFs to choose from.

“Those new ETFs are often active in nature, and they're becoming more relevant by the day.”

In 2025 to date, outcome ETFs have seen US$780 billion in net inflows.

“Twenty-five percent of the ETF industry’s net new base fee revenue is from outcome ETFs.”

Back in 1993, the fund landscape was 98% active and two percent passive while today the split is about 50/50 as clients focus on diversification and costs.

“There's nothing passive about how ETFs are being used […] model portfolios have become a US$4.2 trillion industry and growing rapidly, and half of those assets are in ETFs, where portfolio managers are making active decisions using account both passive and active underlyings,” Zamkovsky said.  

Blackrock’s multi-asset income portfolio managers have used institutional structured notes as part of long-standing strategies to generate yield alongside fixed income and dividend funds. This year, they added two outcome ETFs: a core US equity growth and income ETF and a high yield call overwriting ETF.

“What’s interesting here is that our US equity growth and income strategy is an active ETF, but in the model portfolio it's being used passively as a core holding inside of an income model.

“On the other hand, the high yield bond call overwriting strategy is an index ETF, but it's being used actively as a relative value play between high yield and high yield with call overwriting to see what makes sense,” said Zamkovsky.

“Worlds are coming together, ETFs and notes, active and passive, many, many others.”

Growth opportunities

From a product perspective, Zamkovsky believes the next wave of growth on the ETF side is going to fit in three categories: ETFs that have more efficiency; ETFs that unlock new exposures; and ETFs that target clear outcomes.

The former are fixed term bond ETFs that have a set maturity. “They mature like a bond, trade like a stock, and diversify like a fund, or put another way, they deliver a defined outcome in an easy to consume fashion.

“This product set has a lot of similarities to structured notes from a fixed maturity perspective, and is growing very rapidly, both in the US and globally,” he said.

As an example of the second category, new exposure, Zamkovsky cited Bitcoin, for which prior to Bitcoin ETFs, it was difficult to attract price movements using traditional instruments.

“It was met by huge client demand, in fact this is the fastest growing ETF in history, crossing US$50 billion in just 11 months and currently approaching US$90 billion.”

Once the iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF (Ibit) launched, the next milestone was listed options, kicking of “an unbelievable flurry of activity”, enabling investment banks to kick off their new product approval processes and get set up for OTC trading.

“These ETFs, both in spot and option market, quickly developed a tremendous amount of volume and liquidity, as they were being used by institutions and retail alike for risk management and other purposes,” said Zamkovsky, adding that banks have started issuing structured notes linked to Ibit, which have attracted a lot of attention.

The third category, outcome ETFs, is growing at an incredible rapid pace, from hardly any assets a few years ago to US$181 billion end-2024 and US$248 billion end-August 2025, according to Zamkovsky.

“We define this as products that offer protection income and growth. Protection, think buffers; income is a lot of the derivative income strategies; and growth are things like accelerators,” he said.

Infrastructure developments have made it easier than ever to launch new products, and also to start new firms.

“We're seeing autocallable and twin-wins migrate to the ETF wrappers, and I believe there's a lot more innovation and very interesting developments from where that came from,” Zamkovsky concluded.

---

Do you have a confidential story, tip or comment you’d like to share? Contact Us | SRP (structuredretailproducts.com)