Mirror, mirror on the wall – who's the most inventive of them all?

With the AssetAwards, finews.com and AssetRush 2025 are honoring, for the first time together, outstanding individuals who have expanded the investment and finance universe through new ideas, technologies, or platform solutions. The aim was not lofty visions, but concrete projects with impact – in the areas of:

• alternative investments
• digital assets
• traditional asset classes

The nominations are based on finews' innovation coverage in 2024 and 2025. In the three categories – Alternatives, Digital Assets, and Traditional Assets – we identified numerous individuals whose achievements stood out due to reach, market resonance, and originality. The nomination of the five candidates per category was based on reader interest in the respective finews articles.

«Assetization, the democratization of all assets, is fundamentally transforming the financial world – real and digital values are being reimagined, restructured, and made investable. With the AssetRush Awards, we want to honor those individuals who are not just following this development but actively shaping it,» says Noëlle Dettwyler, organizer of AssetRush.

Now it's the audience's turn: Readers of finews.com are invited to vote publicly online to determine the winners. The awards ceremony will take place on May 14, 2025, during AssetRush in Zurich – the innovation festival of the Swiss financial center.

Category I: Alternatives

Steffen Meister, Executive Chairman of the Board, Partners Group

Under the leadership of Steffen Meister, Partners Group is launching a new multi-private-markets investment vehicle together with Blackrock. The initiative allows wealth advisors to combine a diversified portfolio of private equity, private credit, and real assets into one product – thereby giving private investors access to markets that were often previously out of reach. → to the finews article

Fatmire Bekiri, Head of Tokenization, Sygnum

Under Fatmire Bekiri, Sygnum Bank became the world’s first regulated bank to tokenize physical artworks – including Picasso’s «Fillette au béret». The project, realized in partnership with Artemundi, allowed over 60 investors to take part via blockchain tokens and demonstrated the potential of fractionalized art investments: legally compliant, digitally accessible, and generating a total return of around 20 percent. → to the finews article

Marco Bizzozero, Head of International & Member of the Executive Committee, iCapital

Marco Bizzozero is spearheading iCapital’s international expansion of one of the world’s leading private markets platforms. Under his direction, iCapital is setting new standards in access to private equity, private credit, and real assets – digitally, globally, and at scale. The fintech firm provides comprehensive technology solutions for alternative investments, enabling banks and wealth managers to offer institutional-style private market investments to clients with lower minimum commitments. The platform currently manages around $230 billion in assets, with $36 billion from non-U.S. investors, and has about 1,800 employees across 17 offices globally. It enables a fully digitalized investment and administration process integrated directly into clients’ systems. → to the finews article

Pascal Schneidinger, Founder & CEO, Partasio

His fintech firm Partasio enables investors, for the first time, to invest as little as CHF 30,000 in diversified, physical blue-chip art portfolios (with individual pieces priced at CHF 1–3 million) via actively managed certificates (AMCs). Partasio focuses on globally established post-war artists with low volatility and applies a private equity model with clear payout logic. This creates a new gateway to one of the most significant real asset classes with low correlation to traditional investments – a market previously reserved for a small circle of wealthy insiders. → to the finews article

Jaime Silio, Head Transformation & Innovation, Securities Services, SIX

At SIX, Jaime Silio is driving the strategic opening of Switzerland’s financial center toward digital real assets. Through its Spanish subsidiary BME, SIX is involved in the OpenBrick platform, which enables tokenized financing and settlement of real estate projects via blockchain. The project connects issuers, investors, and intermediaries – opening up new, non-bank-based access to real estate assets across Europe. → to the finews article

On the next page: discover the nominees in the «Digital Assets» category and cast your vote for the winners.