Cerulli sees ETF growth as a distribution story

The next ETF distribution battleground is forming outside the U.S. domestic shelf. In a new Cerulli report flagged by ETF Express, globally oriented ETFs are drawing more attention from institutional and retail investors in Latin America and the U.S. offshore space.

The report—The Cerulli Report—Latin American Distribution Dynamics 2026: Seizing on New Distribution Opportunities in a Shifting Investment Landscape—is built around distribution, with product design a secondary concern, and that choice matters. U.S. issuers are fighting a crowded placement war, with record launches meeting finite shelf space, as this publication has argued. Latin America and the offshore channel run on different math: the global ETFs already exist; what is missing is the connection to intermediaries and the investors they serve.

The U.S. ETF market's growth problem has become one of distribution as much as creation: record launches are meeting finite advisor attention and platform capacity, which is why closures and consolidation are the cycle's other half. If Cerulli is right that Latin American and offshore investors are turning to global ETFs, issuers have a second front to open, but only if the distribution infrastructure reaches those investors.

Cerulli groups institutional and retail investors in the same sentence, which suggests a convergence in how those two segments reach global markets. If the same cross-border ETF wrapper is serving both, the distribution chain—local intermediaries, custody wiring, registration—has to be rebuilt around that overlap. The report's subtitle points to new distribution opportunities, which means the binding constraint in Latin America is access rather than product availability. It also raises the question of whether U.S. issuers are positioned to capture the preference before it turns into flow. For U.S. issuers, the practical question is whether their product lineup looks global to a Latin American allocator.

The article does not publish Cerulli's underlying figures, so the size of the shift remains unquantified. Its direction, however, is clear enough for issuers to treat Latin America as a distribution problem. The winners will be firms that already hold Latin American and offshore distribution relationships, or that build them while attention still runs ahead of flows. Expect the arms race to show up in hiring and partnerships: fund groups without a Latin American footprint are likely to build one, and the RIA and private-bank channels that serve offshore clients are the natural partners.