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Advisors are running out of the one resource they can’t manufacture more of: time. They are being squeezed between increasingly complex capital markets, rising client expectations, and a rapidly expanding universe of products and structures. In that environment, Greg Stumm, President and CEO of American Beacon Partners and American Beacon Advisors, believes the biggest value an asset manager can deliver is scale — not just in assets, but in research, access, and curation.
“What we’re seeing is advisors are super time-crunched,” he said at the Future Proof CityWide Conference in Miami. “They only want to work with somewhere between six and ten partner firms. They look at us as a portal to a curated list of boutiques and different ideas they can’t get from the bigger players out there, and we feel like we’re really scaling them up with the research that we’re doing on that side.”
For financial advisors trying to run focused, differentiated practices without adding dozens of new relationships, American Beacon is positioning itself as that scalable portal.
A Multi‑Affiliate Platform Built for Advisors
American Beacon Advisors has long used an open‑architecture, multi‑manager model, selecting specialist sub‑advisors across asset classes and vehicles. Today, the broader American Beacon platform spans mutual funds, CITs, active ETFs, interval funds, UMAs, and direct indexing, giving advisors multiple ways to implement high‑conviction ideas in client portfolios.
Behind the scenes, the firm is constantly vetting and monitoring a network of boutique managers and institutional‑quality sub‑advisors. American Beacon provides product design, operational infrastructure, and distribution so those managers can focus on generating returns, while advisors access them through a streamlined, advisor‑friendly platform.
For time‑starved practices, that means:
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Fewer relationships to manage, with access to a broad lineup of specialist managers.
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Multiple vehicle choices around the same core ideas (mutual funds, ETFs, SMAs, etc.).
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Institutional‑grade due diligence and ongoing oversight outsourced to American Beacon’s research team.
In short, advisors can differentiate their portfolios with boutique and specialized strategies while still operating a concentrated, scalable partner list.
Rethinking Wrappers: Where Mutual Funds Still Win
In a world obsessed with ETFs, Stumm is quick to point out that structure still matters — and sometimes the “old‑school” option is the right one.
“I’m gonna go a little old school on you for a second,” he said. “I think mutual funds in very specific cases are really valuable tools.” He described a capacity‑constrained strategy with about 2 billion dollars under management and room for only roughly 2 billion more. “That only works in a mutual fund format. You’re getting a daily liquid fund with a double‑digit yield. People think, ‘mutual fund bad.’ It’s like, no, no, no. For the right reason, it’s good. That’s one where I think people are dismissing things because of wrappers.”
For advisors, the message is clear:
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Capacity‑constrained, specialist strategies may need a mutual fund wrapper to be managed responsibly.
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Daily liquidity and yield—when combined with tight capacity—can create compelling risk‑return profiles for income‑oriented clients.
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Blanket “no‑mutual‑fund” policies risk excluding some of the more interesting solutions in today’s market.
American Beacon’s mutual fund lineup spans equity, fixed income, and liquid alternatives, many run by sub‑advisors that institutional investors have used for decades. The firm’s role is to identify where a fund structure still delivers the best client outcome versus an ETF, SMA, or other vehicle.
High‑Conviction Active ETFs and Liquid Alts
That said, American Beacon is far from nostalgic. The firm has embraced active ETFs and liquid alternatives as key tools for modern portfolios, including the American Beacon AHL Trend ETF and other strategies created with long‑standing partners like Man AHL.
“Everyone’s power users of ETFs now,” Stumm noted. “But they’re using a lot of passive and then a lot of 'active' — and I’m using air quotes here — because they’ve got 600, 700 securities in there and that’s not real active. We’ve been focused on trying to get active managers to deliver a high‑conviction strategy in an ETF format.”
Trend‑following is a prime example. American Beacon’s AHL Trend ETF seeks to capture price trends across more than 20 global markets through a fully systematic strategy with historically low correlation to traditional assets. According to Stumm, it remains one of the most underused diversifiers in advisor portfolios.
“Alts are challenging because the best alts don’t have a lot of beta in them, and beta is usually good over time,” he said. “What we’re focused on a lot right now is trend following. If advisors can execute on that and really explain to clients the diversification powers, it’s pound for pound one of the best diversifiers you can put in a portfolio.”
For advisors managing 60/40‑dominated books, the American Beacon platform offers:
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Liquid alternative mutual funds and ETFs targeting diversification and “crisis alpha.”
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High‑conviction active ETFs designed to provide more meaningful active risk than “index‑hugging” products.
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Education and content to help translate complex strategies like trend‑following into client‑friendly language.
Defining Success Through Behavior, Not Just Benchmarks
Stumm is equally focused on how advisors define “success” with clients. In his view, the best wealth advisors are less portfolio technicians and more behavioral coaches.
“I think the best wealth advisors are really just psychiatrists,” he said. “If you don’t think about the behavioral side of investing, you’re failing your clients. So many things have become commoditized, and that’s the one thing that’s impossible to replace with an AI agent.”
American Beacon works with advisors who are pairing planning and investing into a more outcome‑oriented framework—less about beating a benchmark every quarter and more about staying on track over full cycles. Stumm described a “crank score,” a consistency rank that measures how often a portfolio adds value over rolling periods.
“If we’re adding value 70% of the time on a three‑year basis, that’s a really good outcome,” he explained. “But it’s all about understanding behavior, because some clients can handle volatility and some clients can’t.”
His experience helping launch “DIET ARK” products illustrates this point. Many investors are underexposed to innovation but cannot tolerate the volatility of flagship innovation strategies. Building lower‑volatility versions lets advisors right‑size the risk while still delivering exposure to transformative themes.
For advisors, American Beacon aims to be a partner in designing portfolios that clients can actually stick with—matching structures, strategies, and volatility profiles to real‑world behavior, not abstract risk scores.
Multi‑Generational Engagement as a Practice Standard
Another recurring theme for Stumm is helping advisors become true multi‑generational wealth partners. American Beacon supports advisors with content, ideas, and events that resonate across age cohorts, especially around disruptive innovation and technology.
“We love getting in front of clients and talking about things like ARK’s big ideas program and technology that’s changing our lives,” he said. “We’ll do client events where we bring in resources to present on topics their client base is passionate about—maybe genomics and its impact on cancer, or autonomous driving and the future of AI. Then we tell clients, ‘Bring your kids.’ If your average client is 60, their kids are probably 40. Have them bring their kids and say, ‘This is the stuff we’re investing in.’”
For advisors worried about retaining assets across generations, early and frequent communication is essential.
“Communication solves 90% of life’s problems,” Stumm added. “If you want to be multi‑generational, you’ve gotta start communicating as early as possible with that next generation.”
With its network of specialist managers and innovation‑oriented partners, American Beacon can help create those content‑rich, cross‑generational touchpoints that deepen relationships beyond performance reviews.
A New Model for Distribution and Collaboration
The same spirit of partnership extends to how American Beacon thinks about distribution—both with boutique managers and with advisors. Many high‑quality investment boutiques struggle to get shelf space or support in large platforms because they lack the breadth or scale to serve the entire advisor relationship.
“What’s happened is, because so many of these boutiques don’t have the breadth of product or the scale from a distribution standpoint, they’re getting pushed out of the platforms and out of the wealth space,” Stumm said. “A win‑win‑win is when we find a great investment team that’s solving a problem for the advisor, we put them on our platform—through one of our funds or ETFs or an SMA or drawdown fund—and we bring that to the advisor. We solved the advisor’s problem; they didn’t have to build a new relationship with another firm. And we scaled up the investment firm by solving that problem.”
Internally, American Beacon is building a culture that mirrors what it believes the future of distribution will require: deep collaboration among specialists.
“The number one thing is a willingness to collaborate,” Stumm said of the next generation of wholesalers and advisors. “You look today and you see traditional firms trying to sell private market solutions, and they’re failing left and right. The problem is the traditional salesperson doesn’t want to collaborate with their private market specialist. They’re territorial. So collaboration really falls apart. We’ve really focused on fostering a culture of collaboration, and it’s been really helpful for us. We might have a traditional wholesaler, an RIA specialist, and a private market specialist all working together on the same deal—and we make sure everyone is compensated appropriately for that.”
From American Beacon’s perspective, technical knowledge around vehicles like drawdown funds, evergreen structures, interval funds, and liquidity waterfalls is becoming table stakes. The differentiator will be how well firms—and individual professionals—collaborate to deliver complete, client‑centric solutions.
Why American Beacon Belongs on Your Short List
For advisors trying to narrow their partner list without sacrificing access or innovation, American Beacon offers a compelling mix:
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A curated, multi‑affiliate platform connecting advisors to institutional‑quality boutiques and specialized sub‑advisors.
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A full toolkit of vehicles—from capacity‑aware mutual funds and liquid alts to high‑conviction active ETFs, SMAs, UMAs, and direct indexing.
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A research‑driven approach to product design, capacity management, and manager selection.
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Behavioral and multi‑generational engagement support that helps advisors build more durable client relationships.
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A collaborative distribution culture that aligns wholesalers, specialists, managers, and advisors around solving real client problems.
In an era where scale is everything—but differentiation still matters—American Beacon aims to give advisors both.
To learn more about American Beacon’s managers, products, and partnership models, visit their website at www.ambeacon.com
Related: Core and Confident: What Schwab’s 2025 ETF Study Tells Advisors About the Future of Portfolios