Intangibles move to the centre of valuation

For much of the modern economy, the most valuable assets a business holds are the ones that never appear on a loading dock: brands, software, data, patents, customer relationships. Lenders, investors and reporting regimes increasingly need those assets valued in ways that can be compared and challenged across borders. Over the past three years, a series of institutional moves — from Geneva to Singapore to Alicante — has pointed in the same direction: toward valuation practice anchored in the International Valuation Standards, and specifically in IVS 210.

The standard underneath

IVS 210 Intangible Assets sits within the Asset Standards, alongside standards for businesses, real property, financial instruments and other asset classes. Like every asset standard, it operates on top of the General Standards — scope of work, bases of value, approaches, data and inputs, models, and documentation and reporting — so an intangibles valuation carries the same structural discipline as any other IVS engagement. That matters for a class of assets where market evidence is often thin and value rests heavily on assumptions about future economic benefit.

Three years, three signals

The institutional momentum is easiest to see laid end to end.

Why lenders and markets care

Each of these initiatives responds to the same practical problem. IP-backed lending, intangibles disclosure and cross-border investment all depend on valuations that a third party can rely on without having been in the room when they were prepared. A patent portfolio valued one way in one jurisdiction and another way across the border is difficult to lend against, difficult to disclose meaningfully and difficult to price. A common standards framework does not remove the difficulty of valuing intangibles — these remain assets where valuation practice is still maturing in places — but it makes the reasoning legible: which basis of value, which approach, which inputs, and why.

What it asks of practitioners

For valuers working in this space, the convergence raises the stakes on fundamentals rather than novelty. The judgements that decide an intangibles valuation — the definition of the asset being valued, the basis of value, the selection and support of inputs where observable data is scarce, and the documentation that lets a reader trace conclusion back to assumption — are exactly the territory of the General Standards. Practitioners who can show their working in those terms will find their reports usable in Singapore’s disclosure regime, in European IP-backed finance as it develops, and in any of the many markets where IVS provides the common reference. The intangibles conversation is becoming a global one, and IVS 210 is increasingly the language in which it is conducted.