Pat Lardner

Breakfast Business with Enterprise Ireland on Newstalk.

Yeah, so we've been leaders in the ETF part of the market.

The first ETF was set up here 25 years ago.

As you say, a lot of the early ETFs were what they called passive ETFs.

So they were trying to replicate or mimic the constituents of a broad index, so well-diversified indices.

What we're seeing more recently is that managers now are delivering active strategies where they make decisions to either to produce an outcome or to beat a market index and

through the delivery mechanism of an ETF.

And in that active ETF segment, Ireland, as you say, has a very, very strong market share.

But based on the fact that we have been leaders in this space for 25 years because we were early, we were organized, we were innovative.

And I think for us to continue to be successful in other parts of the market, as we are in ETFs, we have to be very agile, whether that be in product structures,

in our regulation, in the delivery of legislation.

But thankfully, we've got a good news story, but one that we're not resting at all on our laurels because we know the needs of investors are changing day by day.

So it's not a new product category.

I mean, if you think of an ETF, it's a delivery mechanism.

So if I wanted to use an analogy, in the same way that people bought music physically and traditionally and then moved on to streaming, an ETF is a more accessible, very, very digitally enabled way for people, and particularly younger people and newer investors to get access.

The active ETF is allowing those managers that would have delivered their funds in traditional form to now use that ETF wrapper to make it very accessible, to democratize it.

It's low cost as well.

So it's a mixture of all of those things.

When you've established an early market position, as we have in ETFs, where all of the expertise, which is provided by people living and working all over Ireland, provide this expertise.

But also the fact that actually people know that when they come here, that the regulatory environment is well understood and well practiced.