DTCC Looks Forward to 2026 and Reflects on its Success in 2025

Looking back on 2025, in what areas did DTCC deliver the most impact to the financial services industry? 

I’m very proud of the work we did last year to drive forward several critical market imperatives. One of the most critical areas was in digital assets, which was marked by the No-Action Letter we received from the SEC in December. As a result, our depository subsidiary, DTC, is authorised to implement and operate a new voluntary service to tokenise DTC-custodied assets. This is a major milestone for the industry and our company, and we expect our tokenisation service will enable greater collateral mobility, new trading modalities and around-the-clock asset transfers, while leveraging smart contracts for automation and instant settlement. We’re aiming to launch the service in the second half of 2026. 

We also provided industry leadership by achieving critical milestones in preparation for the implementation of the SEC’s rule for centralised clearing of US Treasuries. In March, we met an important regulatory deadline to implement key compliance requirements, including upgrading our access models and launching new Treasury clearing capabilities to separate house and customer activity and segregate customer margin accounts, among other efforts. Looking ahead, we are continuing to work closely with the industry to extend our cross-margining agreement with CME to end-users (pending regulatory approval) and are exploring different access models to meet the diverse needs of the industry. 

I also want to recognise the great strides we made advancing our technology modernisation strategy, including our future plans to host Tier 1 core clearance, settlement and risk applications on the public cloud following receipt of a “No Objection” notice from the SEC. This is a milestone achievement that will help strengthen our disaster‑recovery capabilities and operational resiliency to protect the global financial markets. 

We also progressed our AI strategy by moving beyond experimentation to production implementations. As part of this, we introduced new AI tools to drive efficiency and deliver insights to enhance the client experience. Our Risk Calculator AI Assistant saves our clients considerable time in otherwise highly manual document reviews for Risk Calculator usage. And our InsightsIQ capability unifies disconnected data into a single conversational interface, enabling our client-facing teams to instantly surface contextual insights to deliver more personalised engagement with our clients at scale. 

As blockchain and AI gain further momentum, how do you see these technologies transforming market structure? 

Adoption and integration of blockchain, cloud, quantum computing and AI will put firms in a strong position to deliver positive benefits to the end investor. As more companies start to implement tokenisation, it’ll be essential that the technology is deployed in a thoughtful and responsible way to enhance the efficiency of the financial ecosystem without disrupting it. Under the SEC’s No-Action Letter, DTC will offer its tokenisation service across multiple Layer 1 and Layer 2 networks, enabling a more interconnected, scalable and efficient digital environment to drive a wider range of applications. 

With regard to AI, I believe it will drive significant transformation of our industry over the long term. The technology’s ability to process, combine and analyse vast amounts of disparate data will provide predictive analytics and anomaly detection that will help protect the markets. We can expect to see companies elevate their organisational output and efficiency as AI automates manual tasks and frees up capacity for employees to focus on strategic, complex work that requires creativity, social intelligence and problem solving. These groundbreaking technologies will be integrated into firms’ operations over time with a high level of care and accountability. As we harness their full power, we can expect to see better price discovery, reduced frictional cost, enhanced safety and soundness and greater resilience in the financial markets. 

What is your perspective on the global operating environment and how will you adapt to the shifting external dynamics? 

We’re at an inflection point in how the markets operate. Both the equity and debt-capital markets are functioning well and very efficiently despite high volatility. In fact, DTCC experienced record volumes and values across our businesses last year. Though there’s still substantial capital and liquidity entering the public markets, the reality is that unless they continue to grow, volatility will persist. At the same time, our industry is facing significant headwinds, which include demand for greater capital and liquidity. However, higher capital and margin requirements are limiting financial institutions’ ability to intermediate, lend and provide liquidity to their clients. The good news is that market structure transformation, such as global accelerated settlement, central clearing of Treasuries, 24x5 trading and tokenisation, are creating opportunities to return capital and liquidity to market participants. At DTCC, we’re executing against a multi-pronged strategy and set of initiatives to optimise capital and liquidity for clients without introducing new risk - all with the goal of increasing funding capacity to the market and improving stability and resiliency in the financial system. 

What do you think will be the biggest opportunities for financial market infrastructures like DTCC in 2026? 

In my 30-plus years in the industry, there has never been a time when infrastructure has been more central to the biggest issues facing the markets. I believe this trend will continue to accelerate as more firms start to adopt digital assets and blockchain. If you think about tokenisation, this is a highly complex issue, but what is crystal clear is that CSDs are going to play a critical role in building digital market infrastructure and facilitating interoperability for the industry. We are committed to leading on this and serving as a strategic partner by collaborating with our clients and other market participants to create the digital markets of the future. Another exciting area where we will lead is private markets, which are growing at an unprecedented rate, with increased competition among private lenders. As public and private markets converge, there’s a clear need for solutions that can alleviate the challenges in the private markets’ lifecycle. We see opportunities to work with the industry to solve for settlement layers so our focus will be on settlement solutions first. Settlement solutions will unlock better data quality, faster settlement with greater settlement certainty and reduced operating costs and risk. As capital formation shifts toward private assets, we’re ready to leverage our trusted, neutral position and deep expertise to develop new market structures and infrastructure in these asset classes. The pace of change in financial services is only going to accelerate, and I’m looking forward to DTCC driving the conversation and leading on these and other issues in partnership with our clients and other market participants.