Sanket Sinha, Managing Director and CEO for Global Asset Management at Lighthouse Canton, laid out the company’s distinctive approach to asset management—one that is tightly integrated into its broader corporate strategy.
Sinha said the company’s decision to build an in-house asset management platform stemmed from a need to differentiate itself from pure-play wealth advisors and to bring proprietary, non-correlated strategies directly to its clients.
A STRATEGIC DIFFERENTIATOR
Lighthouse Canton began its journey as a wealth and asset management company, and Sinha noted that the company made a strategic early pivot towards becoming an integrated investment institution.
“When you only distribute third-party products, there’s a limitation in terms of value proposition,” Sinha said. “Having our own asset management arm along with a wealth management vertical enables us to offer unique strategies and a differentiated platform—this gives us a tangible edge when we speak with large asset allocators, be it Asian or global institutional investors or families.”
This view is increasingly relevant.
According to PwC, asset and wealth managers are accelerating to establish and expand their multi-asset solutions as investors increasingly seek branded multi-capability firms to meet their needs. As an example, the consulting firm also states that private markets, which accounted for around USD 250 billion of revenue in 2022, will drive 50% of global revenue by 2027.
Lighthouse Canton’s vision of strong asset management capabilities places the asset and wealth manager squarely in that forward-moving cohort.
DIFFERENTIATION THROUGH SPECIALISATION
Sinha shared that the company was deliberate in steering away from crowded strategies.
Instead, Lighthouse Canton focuses on building strategies around three pillars: low market correlation, long-term income generation, and diversified liquidity structures.
Pillar One: Low Correlation, High Resilience
“We emphasise strategies that are not highly correlated with public markets,” Sinha noted. He shared a few strategies of Lighthouse Canton to explain this better
“We’ve been running a supply chain-focused private credit strategy for six years now,” Sinha shared. “It offers monthly liquidity and has never delivered a negative return.”
This background forms the basis for Lighthouse Canton’s recently launched private credit follow on fund.
“We’ve also been doing special credit strategies with no investor losses whatsoever”, noted Sinha.
He also pointed to their life sciences-focused real estate strategy, where they develop lab spaces anchored by major pharmaceutical tenants.“We have the largest life sciences real estate platform in South Asia by square footage,” Sinha noted.“Our capital partnership with La Caisse was a pivotal milestone. When La Caisse came in, we were at around 8.5 million square feet. Now we are close to 14 million square feet.”
La Caisse, formerly CDPQ, is a global investment group managing funds primarily for public and parapublic pension and insurance plans in Quebec.
Sinha also cited their flagship LC Beacon strategy, expaining how it remains resilient regardless of market cycles. “Even if the S&P 500 drops 25%, Beacon won’t mirror that decline—it’s market-neutral.” The fund’s annualised return for 2024 stood at 9.43%, with a 1.02% gain in August, showcasing an impressive 4.01% outperformance over SOFR during this period. It won the HFM APAC performance award in 2024.
“When markets are down, these strategies don’t necessarily track those losses,” Sinha said, adding that such products serve as stabilisers in volatile environments.
Pillar Two: Income Generation as a Core Focus
With market volatility and interest rate uncertainty in play, income has become the new capital appreciation for many institutional investors.
“If you're not taking market risk, you can't be speculating on capital gains,” Sinha said. Instead, Lighthouse Canton is focused on strategies that generate long-term, sustainable income—such as private credit, high-yield real assets, and structured credit solutions.
“Our private credit strategies offer investors from 7.5% all the way to 17 to 18% returns annually, relatively independent of what's happening in the broader equity markets,” Sinha shared.
This focus on income generation is tailored for institutional investors with long-term liability structures—such as insurance companies, pension funds, and endowment-style family offices.
“Insurance companies need predictable income because they have insurance liabilities. Pension funds have defined pension obligations—so income stability is critical,” Sinha explained.
Among Lighthouse Canton’s institutional investor base are some of the world’s largest venture firms, global insurance companies, and banking institutions, reflecting the strong alignment of its strategy with these investors’ needs.
Pillar Three: Tailored Liquidity Profiles
While institutional-style asset classes often come with long lock-ups, Lighthouse Canton offers investors a spectrum of liquidity options.
“We have everything from monthly liquidity structures to seven-year lock-ups,” Sinha said. Returns scale with duration—monthly liquidity might yield around 7%, while a seven-year real asset strategy could offer 15%, he added.
“The philosophy doesn’t change—only the risk-return and liquidity characteristics do,” Sinha noted. This flexibility, he said, enables the firm to appeal to a broad base of clients—from pension funds and insurance companies to family offices.
ASIA’S NEW INSTITUTIONAL INVESTORS
Moving beyond traditional institutional investors that Lighthouse Canton caters to using these strategies, Sinha also pointed out that Asia’s family offices are also fast evolving to resemble institutional allocators.
“Fifteen years ago, the concept of a family office barely existed in India. Now, you have tech entrepreneurs and industrialists building institutional-style portfolios,” he said.
He noted that family offices today adopt endowment-style models, blending liquid and illiquid investments and seeking income stability alongside capital preservation. “The asset mix is similar to what you’d see at a pension fund—the only difference is in allocation percentages,” Sinha said.
According to Campden Wealth, Asian family offices now allocate nearly 45% of their portfolios to alternative assets—a figure that has grown steadily over the past five years. This dovetails with Lighthouse Canton’s offerings, which straddle private credit, real estate, and income-focused alternatives.
For serving these sophisticated investors Sinha felt there’s a clear white space of regional asset managers with a cross-border investment lens.
With capital increasingly flowing across geographies and allocators demanding nuanced strategies, Sinha believes the opportunity for managers with regional depth and global discipline is vast.
“We aspire to be one of the leading regional players in this space,” Sinha said—reflecting a forward-looking strategy not just for Lighthouse Canton, but for the evolution of asset management in Asia.
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