Fabian Dori
Chief Investment Officer, Sygnum
Digital assets managed the way a private bank manages a portfolio: a discretionary mandate, agreed risk limits, and a regulated counterparty holding execution authority.
Why the room needs them.
Fabian Dori is Chief Investment Officer at Sygnum, a digital asset banking group with a Swiss banking licence. He sits on the Group Executive Board and leads the team behind its institutional investment strategies and asset management products. He spoke at Proof of Talk Paris 2026 as a panellist on "How Institutions Actually Access Tokenised Assets", alongside executives from Zodia Custody, Spectrum Nodes and Google. In February 2026 Sygnum launched Sygnum Select, a discretionary mandate service that applies Swiss private banking's portfolio management model to digital assets.
The full account.
Fabian Dori is Chief Investment Officer at Sygnum and a member of its Group Executive Board. Sygnum describes itself as a global digital asset banking group founded on Swiss and Singapore heritage; it holds a Swiss banking licence and CMS and Major Payment Institution licences in Singapore. His remit, as the bank states it, is to lead the team responsible for developing Sygnum's institutional investment strategies and its growing portfolio of passive and active asset management products.
He spoke at Proof of Talk Paris 2026 as a panellist on "How Institutions Actually Access Tokenised Assets", a session that ran from 10:00 to 10:35 on 3 June 2026 on the Taostats Stage, in the Tokenisation of Finance track. The other panellists were Julian Sawyer of Zodia Custody, Matthew Felice Pace of Spectrum Nodes and Moritz Platt of Google. Xavier Gomez, Chief Operating Officer of Vancelian, moderated.
Dori came to digital assets from systematic, quantitative asset management, with a Master of Arts in Quantitative Economics and Finance and a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from the University of St. Gallen. He worked at Wegelin & Co. Private Bankers, and was a member of the management board and Head of Portfolio Management at 1741 Asset Management, developing managed futures and cash-equity strategies with Urs Schubiger for more than five years. Two co-authored papers on asset allocation and risk parity appeared in 2011 and 2012. Until May 2017 he was Chief Investment Officer at Notenstein La Roche and a member of its executive committee, and that September he joined Aquila Capital's Zurich-based Systematic Trading Group as Quantitative Strategist and Portfolio Manager.
Sygnum's own team page listed him as Chief Information Officer in August 2019. On 1 October 2020 he became Head of Asset Management, leading a newly created asset management entity, and served as Group CEO ad interim until the end of that year. Sygnum extended its asset management offering to Germany and Liechtenstein in September 2025, and launched the discretionary mandate service Sygnum Select in February 2026. Writing in CoinDesk in August 2026, he argued that crypto has institutionalised but still trades like a rumour mill.
What Fabian believes about the next ten years.
Years of shipping.
Lines that keep proving correct.
“Crypto foundations and corporate treasuries are no longer simply looking for custody and trading. They want a trusted, regulated counterparty who can actively manage their assets with the same discipline and holistic approach as a traditional private bank.”
“The real edge is to invest rather than to speculate: to read what is happening beneath the price, the funding rates, the fund flows, the options positioning and the onchain behavior, and to be willing to hold a view even when the price and that data disagree.”
“From a macro perspective, regulatory clarity, institutional adoption and counterparty soundness, the picture today is totally different from 2022. This is not the same systemic risk environment.”
What they have built, written, and backed.
Built
- Sygnum SelectA discretionary mandate service for digital assets, run on the portfolio management model of Swiss private banking, launched on 26 February 2026 with live client mandates and client assets already in place. Sygnum takes full execution authority within a client's agreed investment framework, covering strategic asset allocation, active rebalancing and continuous risk oversight including VaR monitoring and drawdown limits. It was initially available to Swiss-domiciled clients only.
- Sygnum's asset management entityOn 1 October 2020 he moved from Chief Information Officer to Head of Asset Management, to lead a newly created asset management entity focused on launching new products and services. The same announcement made him Group CEO ad interim until the end of the year, while Mathias Imbach moved from Singapore to Switzerland.
- Distribution into Germany and LiechtensteinIn September 2025 Sygnum took its asset management products into two further markets, building on a Liechtenstein registration made in September 2024 and distributing through a liability umbrella arrangement with Reuss Private Access, with Sygnum Europe overseeing EU distribution. Dori said the expansion reflected strong demand from institutional investors seeking trusted access to sophisticated crypto investment strategies.
- Published research on asset allocation and risk parity"(R)Evolution of Asset Allocation", written with Frank Haeusler and David Stefanovits, was posted to SSRN on 8 October 2011 and last revised on 11 February 2012. "The Risk Parity Approach to Asset Allocation - Climbing the Wall of Worries?", written with Haeusler, Manuel Krieger, Urs Schubiger and Stefanovits, appeared as 1741 Asset Management Research Note Series 3/2012, dated September 2012.
The next Proof of Talk is in Abu Dhabi.
Louvre Abu Dhabi, 3–4 December 2026. Admission is by application, and the room is capped at 2,000.
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