Interview with Hector McNeil: Building Europe’s ETF Industry

This is the first of two articles from my conversation with HANetf Co-Founder and Co-CEO Hector McNeil. Here, we explore how one of Europe’s best-known ETF entrepreneurs came to see exchange traded funds not simply as investment products, but as a force that has fundamentally changed who gets to participate in financial markets.

For more than twenty-five years, Hector McNeil has helped build businesses around exchange traded funds. He’s launched products, founded companies and watched the European ETF industry evolve from a specialist corner of asset management into one of its fastest-growing sectors.

Few people have had a closer view of that transformation or played a more active role in shaping it. Yet what struck me most during our conversation wasn’t his enthusiasm for ETFs themselves. It was the consistency of the idea that has shaped his career.

Again and again, whether we were discussing entrepreneurship, product launches or the future of the industry, Hector returned to the same principle: ETFs have helped democratise investing. They have lowered barriers, broadened access and given millions of investors opportunities that were once largely reserved for institutions.

It’s an idea that feels almost self-evident today. Twenty-five years ago, it wasn’t.

What did Hector see that others didn’t?

Like many careers in financial markets, Hector’s wasn’t built around a carefully constructed masterplan. His introduction to ETFs came at a time when the industry was still finding its feet and when many market participants viewed the wrapper as an interesting innovation rather than something capable of reshaping investing.

Looking back, Hector believes much of the industry’s early attention focused on the mechanics of ETFs rather than their broader significance. Conversations revolved around structure, trading and index tracking. Far less attention was paid to what ETFs could ultimately mean for investors themselves.

As he explained, the real innovation wasn’t simply creating another investment vehicle. It was creating a structure that allowed ordinary investors to access markets on terms that had traditionally been reserved for much larger institutions.

“My mum can buy one share and get exactly the same deal as Fidelity,” he observed.

It’s a wonderfully simple observation, but one that captures a profound shift. Rather than creating another specialist product, ETFs helped narrow the gap between retail and institutional investing. Suddenly, sophisticated market exposure could be accessed through a single listed security, giving investors a level of simplicity, transparency and accessibility that had previously been much harder to achieve.

Looking back now, it’s easy to assume that outcome was inevitable, but Hector doesn’t see it that way. He remembers an industry that was still trying to convince investors the ETF structure deserved their attention, let alone their confidence. While many were debating the wrapper itself, he found himself thinking about something much bigger: what that wrapper could eventually enable.

What did the industry misunderstand?

One theme surfaced repeatedly throughout our conversation: hindsight has a habit of making successful innovations feel inevitable.

Today, ETFs sit at the centre of global investing, spanning almost every asset class, geography and investment style, and serving everyone from first-time investors to some of the world’s largest institutions. Looking back from that vantage point, it’s easy to assume the industry’s trajectory was obvious from the outset.

Hector remembers something very different.

In the early years, the conversation wasn’t about democratising investing or reshaping portfolio construction. It was about explaining what an ETF actually was. Much of the industry’s effort went into overcoming scepticism, educating investors and demonstrating that the structure could do far more than simply track an index.

Many people viewed ETFs as an interesting niche. Far fewer imagined they would become one of the defining investment wrappers of the modern era.

Hector has his own way of describing what happened next.

“The ETF black hole.”

It’s his shorthand for the idea that more and more investment strategies are gradually drawn into the ETF wrapper. What began with broad market indices has steadily expanded into smart beta, thematic investing, active strategies and increasingly more specialised areas of the market.

In Hector’s view, once an investment can be delivered efficiently through an ETF, the gravitational pull becomes difficult to resist.

What struck me was how little Hector romanticised those years. There was no suggestion that everyone involved knew they were building the future of investing. If anything, the opposite was true. Progress came through persistence rather than inevitability, with each stage of the industry’s development requiring another obstacle to be overcome before the next opportunity emerged.

That experience seems to have shaped his broader thinking about innovation. Throughout our discussion, he showed remarkably little interest in novelty for its own sake. New ideas matter, but only if they solve genuine problems for investors and make markets work better.

It also explains why his career has never really been about individual launches. It has been about building better ways for investment ideas to reach investors.

Why did entrepreneurship keep pulling him back?

Perhaps that philosophy also explains the choices Hector made throughout his career.

While many people spend their working lives building expertise within a single organisation, Hector repeatedly found himself drawn towards building businesses instead. Over more than two decades, he has helped establish and grow multiple ETF firms, each reflecting a different stage in the industry’s evolution. The names changed, the market matured and investor expectations evolved, but the motivation behind those ventures remained remarkably consistent.

As he reflected on the realities of entrepreneurship, one observation stood out.

“It always takes twice as long and twice as much money as you think.”

It’s a comment that will resonate with almost anyone who has built a business. Successful ventures are often judged by the finished product, yet the reality is years of uncertainty, adaptation and persistence. Listening to Hector, it became clear that he doesn’t see entrepreneurship as a series of successes or failures. He sees it as a process of identifying worthwhile problems and having the patience to solve them.

That perspective changes the way you look at his career. It’s tempting to see four ETF businesses and four entrepreneurial ventures. Hector seems to see something rather different. Each business reflected a different challenge facing the industry at a particular moment in its development. Some expanded capability, others widened access, but all shared the same objective: making the ETF ecosystem work better.

By this point in our conversation, I found myself wondering whether Hector had spent the last twenty-five years just building businesses, or whether he had, in fact, been helping to build an industry.

Building businesses or building an industry?

As we continued talking, it became clear that Hector doesn’t really distinguish between entrepreneurship and the evolution of the ETF industry. Looking back over his career, the businesses feel less like isolated ventures and more like milestones in the market’s own development.

That perhaps explains why he spent less time talking about products than I expected. After helping to launch hundreds of ETFs, there was remarkably little discussion of individual funds or headline asset numbers. Instead, our conversation kept returning to something less visible but arguably far more important: the infrastructure that allows good investment ideas to reach investors.

Throughout his career, Hector has been involved in businesses that approached the market from different angles:

• Some expanded the range of investment opportunities available through ETFs
• Others helped specialist asset managers access the wrapper without having to build the entire operational infrastructure themselves

Although the businesses differed, the underlying objective remained remarkably consistent.

The challenge wasn’t simply creating another ETF; it was making the ETF ecosystem work better.

That distinction feels important because it’s easy to look back at the industry’s growth and focus on the products that succeeded. Hector’s perspective is different. Successful products matter, of course, but they only exist because someone has built the distribution, operational capability and market infrastructure needed to support them. Without those foundations, even the strongest investment idea can struggle to find an audience.

It reminded me that when people talk about innovation, they naturally focus on the breakthroughs they can see. Yet much of the industry’s real progress has happened behind the scenes: better processes, stronger partnerships and more effective ways of connecting investment ideas with investors.

Perhaps that’s why Hector’s entrepreneurial journey has never felt driven by novelty alone. Each business seems to have started with the same question.

What barrier still exists and how do we remove it?

What gap did HANetf close?

That mindset eventually led to the creation of HANetf.

By the time the business was founded, ETFs were no longer an emerging concept. The wrapper had become widely accepted, and investor demand continued to grow. Yet Hector could still see another gap in the market.

Launching an ETF business remained an expensive and operationally complex undertaking. Specialist asset managers often had compelling investment ideas but lacked the infrastructure, regulatory expertise and operational capability needed to bring those ideas to market.

Rather than asking how to launch another ETF issuer, Hector and his long-time business partner, Nik Bienkowski, asked a different question.

What if talented investment managers no longer needed to build an ETF platform from scratch?

What if they could focus on developing investment strategies while someone else provided the infrastructure needed to launch and manage the product?

That frustration became the foundation for HANetf.

The business would develop innovative ETFs of its own while also pioneering a white-label platform that enabled specialist asset managers to access the ETF wrapper without having to build the entire operating infrastructure themselves.

In many respects, it was the natural continuation of everything we’d discussed throughout the afternoon. As the ETF industry matured, the challenge was no longer convincing investors that ETFs worked. It was making the wrapper accessible to a broader range of investment managers with differentiated ideas.

As we spoke about the early days of HANetf, one small detail made me smile. The company’s name wasn’t the product of an elaborate branding exercise. It simply combined the founders’ names.

HAN – Hector and Nik.

It’s a small anecdote, but it captures the way Hector approaches business. Throughout our conversation, Hector consistently reduced complex industry challenges to remarkably simple questions. How do you make investing more accessible? How do you make launching ETFs less complicated? How do you help good investment ideas reach investors more efficiently?

HANetf became one answer to those questions.

It did so not only by developing its own innovative ETF range, but also by pioneering a white-label model that enabled specialist asset managers to bring their own investment ideas to market.

More than just a wrapper

Before sitting down with Hector, I expected much of our conversation to revolve around ETFs. We would discuss product development, market structure, regulation, and the industry’s extraordinary growth over the past 25 years. We covered all of those subjects, of course, but by the end, they felt almost secondary.

What stayed with me was something much simpler.

Again and again, regardless of where the conversation began, it seemed to arrive at the same destination. Whether discussing entrepreneurship, product innovation, infrastructure or the future of asset management, Hector kept returning to the same idea: successful industries are built by making markets more accessible and creating better ways for good investment ideas to reach investors.

Perhaps that’s why his career feels unusually coherent when viewed as a whole.

It’s easy to see four businesses, hundreds of ETF launches and more than two decades spent helping shape one of Europe’s fastest-growing areas of asset management. Those are significant achievements in their own right. Yet they also risk obscuring the thread that connects them.

Hector doesn’t appear to think in terms of products first: he thinks in terms of problems.

If an idea makes investing simpler, broadens access or helps more investors participate in financial markets, it’s worth pursuing. If it doesn’t, novelty alone isn’t enough.

The ETF industry will continue to evolve. New investment strategies will emerge, technology will reshape distribution, and new structures will challenge today’s conventions. But if our conversation taught me anything, it’s that the industry’s most enduring innovations are often the ones that quietly improve how markets work.

And perhaps that’s the real story behind Hector McNeil’s career.

It hasn’t simply been about building ETF businesses; it’s been about helping build an industry.