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, where 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.
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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