Swiss securitisation platform specialist firm Gentwo has established a representative office in Geneva and appointed Pierre-Noël Formigé (right) to its advisory board.

Formigé - a banker with a number of years of experience in asset management - will be responsible for clients in the French-speaking Switzerland. Formigé reports to chairman Patrick Loepfe and CEO Philippe A. Naegeli.

Prior to joining GenTwo he founded Wealthings - a financial services hub for asset managers, as well as fund management company Sequoia - which he also managed as a CEO. Formigé looks back on a long and varied career including investment banking at Merrill Lynch in London, New York and Geneva and private banking at Coutts in Geneva.

The firm, which builds segregated securitization platforms for financial intermediaries, is seeking to strengthen its position in French-speaking Switzerland in response to ‘increasing demand for innovative securitization through structured financial products without the issuer risk of a bank’.

Gentwo FP is seeking to disrupt the conventional issuance of structured products by offering individual off-balance sheet issuance vehicles to empower everyone to be able to structure and issue them individually in a flexible way and at the lowest cost.

"With this approach, there is no exposure to balance sheets, or issuer risk, and there are no high overheads that increase the cost of the product," said Naegeli. "Any financial intermediary can engage in structuring and issuing tailor made products without counterparty risk or needles costs."