##  [# ICI’s Weinberg: An Insider's View of ETF Industry Priorities](/sections/conferences/icis-weinberg-insiders-view-etf-industry-priorities) 

 

# ICI’s Weinberg: An Insider's View of ETF Industry Priorities

 

 

The flood of ETF launches seems unending, with the industry smashing through AUM and trading records once again this year. With so many ETFs trading, ICI’s Josh Weinberg offers an inside look at what the hottest topics and trends were at the 2026 ICI ETF Conference this year.



 

 

 

 

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[By ETF.com Staff](/contributors/etfcom-staff)

 Jul 16, 2026

 Edited by: ETF.com Staff

 

 

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For one week, the center of the ETF industry congregated in Nashville, TN for the ICI 2026 ETF Conference. Josh Weinberg, Associate General Counsel, ICI, sat down with Dave Nadig, President &amp; Director of Research at ETF.com, to talk the hot trends of the conference. Weinberg explained that it’s a conference specifically for the sell side of the industry, by demand. As such, tax policy dominated the halls, with a standing-room-only panel on 351 conversions landing right as Bloomberg dropped a critical piece on ETF tax mechanics, and ICI President and CEO Eric Pan used his opening remarks to defend the tax structure benefiting long-term investors. Tokenization, AI, and share-class conversions rounded out the agenda, with Weinberg noting the conference could grow but still feels right-sized for now.

On share classes, Weinberg was blunt: we're still in the early innings, with only a handful of firms actually live despite plenty holding the regulatory relief. The real strategic fork, he argued, is conversions versus share classes—converting a mutual fund to an ETF outright works fine if you have no retirement-platform investors, but it slams the door on anyone who needs that traditional mutual fund wrapper. Meanwhile, the ETF vehicle keeps swallowing more of the industry's innovation, from leveraged single-stock funds to derivatives-heavy income products, and Weinberg's answer to whether that's sustainable was essentially to let the market decide.

Retail's growing pull and the messy information ecosystem around it (Reddit threads, self-styled influencers, plenty of misinformation) was floated as both an opportunity and a headache, with ICI positioning itself as an educator to regulators and the public rather than a referee for social media. Weinberg pushed back hard on any notion that the U.S. market is tapped out, pointing to continued domestic growth even as international expansion (UCITS, Canada, Europe) picks up steam. He teased that next year’s conference, held in New Orleans, will likely dig deeper into tokenization and AI's accelerating role in fund creation. The overarching theme: everyone agrees the ETF wrapper is where asset management's real innovation is happening, even if nobody's quite sure how much more it can absorb.



 

 

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