Is art now an asset class?

Suez Canal Bank (SCB) and Art D'Égypte recently signed a strategic partnership to treat art as an investable economic asset, with plans to integrate a new art advisory platform into SCB’s wealth-management arm. The bank’s Privé clients can have access to curated acquisition opportunities, retail financing to buy art, and portfolios shaped by Art D'Égypte's curators. To launch the new partnership, Anthea Peers, President of Christie’s Europe and Middle East, made her first visit to Egypt last week to discuss the growing importance of art in the investment landscape.

“The aggregate art market across all global auction houses goes up and down across a precise 5-year cycle and is valued at around USD 68 bn,” Peers told an audience of Cairo collectors and investors at the launch event for SCB’s art advisory and art investment program. “We are currently at the start of a global up cycle,” which she attributes to the fact that “there are a lot of people, making a lot of money.” According to Peers, nearly half of the art market is in the US, with art going from 1% of a HNW collector’s portfolio to nearly 10%.

The wealth management industry has spent more than a decade absorbing art into its offering. Deloitte’s 2025 Art & Finance Report, which tracks the integration of art into wealth management, finds that globally 51% of wealth managers now provide art-related services — up from just a quarter in 2011 — and that 65% report clients actively seeking help with art, compared to 44% a year earlier. Behind the shift is an estimated USD 992 bn in art and collectibles that’s expected to change hands over the next decade. Deloitte calls it institutionalization with financing, art-secured lending, advisory desks, and fractional ownership turning a private passion into a managed asset.

The financial rationale rests on diversification. Because art has a low correlation to both bonds and equities, advocates of owning art as an investment make the argument that art can hold its value when financial markets are uncertain. Advisors typically recommend a small satellite position — conservatively around 5%, concentrated in blue-chip names with genuine markets.

Where does Egypt and the region fit into all this?

The local art scene has been gaining momentum over the last 4-5 years. Christie’s reports that sales of modern Middle Eastern art rose 298% from 2020-2024. Gulf capital is flooding into museums and fairs; and contemporary Egyptian names — like Wael Shawky, who represented Egypt at the 2024 Venice Biennale and served as the artistic director of the 2026 Art Basel Qatar, and Ghada Amer, whose work hangs at the Guggenheim and the Centre Pompidou — are becoming more prominent.

“The UAE is probably the fastest-growing network of collectors, investors, and family offices in the world right now,” Adam Baldwin, founder and CEO of Baldwin Contemporary and Baldwin Fine Art Acquisitions told EnterpriseAM UAE last December. Baldwin, who started his business in London and has a secondary presence in Miami, has decided to make Dubai his third location.

Thinking of investing in art?

Proceed with caution. Investment advisor Sagui Hamed, the founder of Square Capital Group presents a contrarian view. “There’s a trend now among the posh elite in Egypt to invest in art, watches and other expensive collectibles. To justify their spending patterns, they classify the purchases as part of an investment portfolio; they are not.”

A portfolio is built by rank: “Least risky and most liquid first, then bonds, real estate, and blue-chip equities — art should sit at the very bottom, bought only once everything else is exhausted and only as a fraction of net worth.”

Hamed’s explanation for the global surge in art investment is the rise of the b’naire class. “The tech boom has created a class of cash-rich buyers with little to buy, and that excess liquidity is chasing scarce trophies — art, watches, luxury real estate. If you don’t have that kind of net worth, art is much too risky. Having said that, if you want to buy a piece of art because you like it and want to hang it on your wall, that’s fine. It may appreciate, it may not. In either case, I think the art market in Egypt is not mature enough for us to talk about art as an asset class.”

Egypt’s own market-builders are candid about the market gaps. Lina Mowafy, co-founder and gallery director of TAM, admits that art can be a relatively illiquid asset and slow to sell. “But that doesn’t mean that a secondary market doesn’t exist. The secondary market runs through galleries that hold each artist's collector list,” she says. But she also names what is missing: no centralised resale infrastructure, opaque pricing, and untrained operators marking work up arbitrarily with no accreditation regime to check them.

The bottom line

Buying art is still more of a personal consumption decision than an investment choice. But initiatives like the SCB–Art D'Égypte partnership are, on balance, a net positive: They bring advisory rigour, financing and a trust signal to a market that has thus far lacked all three. Mowafy’s advice for would-be art collectors is simple: Art is a very nice journey of discovery. Trust your instincts, buy what you like through people whose reputations you can verify, and choose work you would be glad to own even if it never appreciates.