Laura Klimpel, Managing Director and Head of Fixed Income and Financing Solutions
DTCC’s Fixed Income Clearing Corporation (FICC) had an incredibly strong year, as evidenced not only by the new innovations and capabilities we continued to launch to support the industry but also by the steadfast growth in community adoption and volumes as financial institutions continued to prepare for the expansion of U.S. Treasury central clearing.
Over the past year, FICC GSD’s average daily volume grew from roughly USD9.1 trillion at the end of 2024 to more than USD13.2 trillion on December 1st, with multiple peaks over USD12 trillion. At the same time, participation in our Sponsored Service and Agent Clearing Service accelerated to over 8,000 indirect participant relationships. FICC’s Sponsored and Agent Clearing Services’ buyside daily volumes peaked at USD3.1 trillion on December 31st, delivering almost USD1.4 trillion in balance sheet capacity for the industry on the same day.
The U.S. Treasury clearing rules represent one of the most significant market structure shifts in decades, and the industry’s strong engagement with FICC underscores its confidence in the benefits of our offerings, access models and a centrally cleared marketplace. At the end of 2025, for example, we launched our new Collateral-in-Lieu service under the Sponsored General Collateral offering, which was developed to address double-margining concerns while delivering significant margin and capital efficiencies. We also recently received regulatory approval to launch our new Agent Clearing Service (ACS) offering, where Agent Clearing Members and their Executing Firm Customers can now take advantage of cleared triparty repo capabilities.
Going into 2026, DTCC will continue to launch new access models and capabilities, subject to regulatory approval. We’ll also continue working with CME Group to extend our long-standing cross-margining arrangement beyond direct members to end-users. Together, these developments will help propel the industry towards compliance with mandatory clearing in 2026 and beyond.
Frank La Salla, President, CEO and Director
2025 tested the global financial system as geopolitical tensions, trade issues and an evolving regulatory landscape amplified uncertainty across markets globally. We saw record increases in values, trading volumes and issuances due to continued volatility, which resulted in a greater need for intermediation and bank capital. However, stricter capital and margin requirements have increased the cost of holding inventory, reducing the capacity for banks to invest, lend and provide liquidity to their clients.
At DTCC, we’re executing against a multi-pronged strategy to optimize capital and liquidity efficiencies for clients without introducing new risk, all with the goal of increasing funding capacity to the market and improving financial market stability and resiliency. These initiatives include our work with CME to enhance our cross-margining arrangement, delivering tri-party repo enhancements and progressing work on our Supplemental Liquidity Deposit.
At the same time, 2025 was a year of significant progress in the digital assets space. I’m pleased to see the industry aligning to drive digital asset acceptance, adoption and utilization. As we look to 2026, DTCC will continue to serve as a strategic partner to the industry by fostering collaboration to build an open, scalable and efficient ecosystem for tokenized assets. We’re excited to help innovate for the industry and to empower our participants and their clients to tokenize.
Brian Steele, Managing Director and President of Clearing and Securities Services
2025 was a significant year for DTCC. We undertook pioneering steps to improve collateral and liquidity across the industry, supported clients as they prepare for 24x5 trading and expanded U.S. Treasury clearing requirements, and continued to take proactive steps to modernize our clearing and settlement infrastructure. Following the receipt of a recent SEC No-Action Letter, we unveiled steps to tokenize certain real-world assets at DTC, taking meaningful steps to effectively bridge the TradFi and DeFi ecosystems.
Over the course of the year, we also launched a program to identify ways that we can provide our clients with further capital relief. The program is focused on quantifying the capital and liquidity benefits of current and prospective DTCC initiatives to ensure prioritization of the most impactful opportunities across all our clients. We are using the program to create new capabilities to analyze and sandbox future efforts, allowing for faster innovation. There are 10 initiatives currently underway.
We also advanced our ambitious roadmap to transform our clearing and settlement systems to fortify our risk management capabilities, advance our offerings and pave a path towards an increasingly digital future. We achieved all of this while continuing to seamlessly process record activity across our clearinghouses and post-trade solutions, underscoring the strength and resiliency of DTCC’s market infrastructure.
As we look forward in 2026, DTCC’s focus is on extending these efficiencies and the value we provide to the industry through innovation while taking the foundational steps to propel the convergence of decentralized and traditional finance and helping to shape the future of the financial markets ecosystem.
Val Wotton, Managing Director and Global Head of Equities Solutions
2026 will be a critical year for Europe’s transition to T+1 settlement. The European Union, Switzerland, Liechtenstein and the UK have all set October 11, 2027, as their go-live date. The 2024 move to T+1 in the US provides insights for a successful transition, but Europe’s fragmented market structure creates unique challenges for market participants. Successful T+1 preparation across the region demands automation. Manual interventions and bottlenecks in post-trade processes need to be addressed to enable same-day trade allocation and confirmation.
2026 will also be a crucial year in readiness for T+1. Firms that invest in straight-through processing, modernized architecture and testing with infrastructure providers will emerge not only as regulatory compliant but will also benefit from the capabilities and efficiencies that automation provides. While preparations should now be well under way, it’s not too late for market participants to ensure readiness for Europe’s move to T+1.
Global markets are also undergoing huge transformations in the front office, with major exchanges actively exploring 24x5 trading. DTCC continues to work closely with exchanges, regulators, and industry partners to ensure a smooth, phased transition to 24x5 trading. These efforts not only address today’s needs but also lay the foundation for a future transition to 24x7 trading as industry infrastructure and regulatory frameworks evolve. While continuous trading rests with the exchanges, DTCC stands ready in 2026 to support overnight trading windows. From Q2 2026, DTCC’s equities clearing subsidiary will increase clearing hours, subject to regulatory review and approval.
Lynn Bishop, Managing Director and Chief Information Officer
For more than 50 years, DTCC’s mission has been to deliver the highest levels of resiliency to the financial markets. In 2026, modernization remains central to our mission as we continue our multi-year transformation to strengthen and advance our technology platform, with a focus on our strategic cloud journey and the growing influence and adoption of artificial intelligence.
To enhance scalability, resiliency, and operational efficiency, we continue moving more services to the public cloud, including our most critical clearance and settlement applications. We’re also making enhancements to improve the automation and security capabilities of our core public cloud platform. At the same time, AI is an undeniable force driving our modernization journey. We’re focused on empowering our engineers to be more efficient and productive to accelerate our transformation. We’ve made great strides – just in the last year, we’ve begun the process of maturing into an AI-driven enterprise where AI agents and coding tools are helping us drive efficiency and operational resiliency. Every AI initiative we pursue is grounded in purpose and responsible governance, and we are already seeing measurable productivity gains while maintaining oversight and control.
As the industry evolves and existing services become increasingly automated, our value will be defined by trust, standardization, and modernized technology that enables us to move quickly and respond to the needs of the ecosystem of the future. We’re collaborating with clients to deliver faster, more secure services, simplifying workflows and improving transparency across the trade lifecycle.
Nadine Chakar, Managing Director and Global Head of DTCC Digital Assets
2025 marked a pivotal year for DTCC as we advanced our digital asset solutions, driving innovation in market infrastructure and decentralized finance. Central to this progress were initiatives in collateral mobility and tokenization, which served as key enablers of our broader vision to enable a more efficient and interconnected financial ecosystem. Through our Great Collateral Experiment, we demonstrated how Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) could increase collateral mobility, with the potential to unlock significant value from inactive assets and deliver meaningful capital efficiencies across the industry.
In addition, following the SEC’s recent No-Action Letter, we announced plans to offer a new service, targeted for the second half of 2026, to tokenize certain real-world, DTC-custodied assets in a controlled, permissioned production environment. DTCC’s tokenization service, underpinned by DTCC’s ComposerX suite of platforms, will enable DTC to create a single pool of liquidity bridging traditional finance and emerging digital ecosystems in a controlled and compliant manner, helping to support a more resilient, inclusive, cost-effective and efficient financial system.
In 2026, DTCC intends to continue advancing robust digital asset solutions across the industry to help define and enable the future of finance. We believe DLT has the potential to reshape markets, and together with the industry, DTCC aims to drive the development of an interoperable digital asset ecosystem that complements the traditional financial system and is designed to operate in a safe, efficient and compliant manner for the benefit of market participants.
Tim Cuddihy, Managing Director and Group Chief Risk Officer
The global risk landscape is entering a phase where stress points like geopolitical shocks, liquidity fragmentation, and emerging technologies are intersecting in unpredictable ways. According to DTCC’s latest Systemic Risk Barometer, geopolitical instability remains the top risk for the fourth consecutive year, while artificial intelligence and cyber-related threats continue to raise industry concern.
As trusted infrastructure, DTCC plays a key role in maintaining the smooth functioning of financial markets. In 2025, DTCC’s clearinghouses and trade processing services handled record volumes, demonstrating our ability to maintain stability during periods of heightened volatility, as we have done for decades.
In 2026, we will continue to play a critical role mitigating risk for the industry as markets extend their trading hours, adopt new technologies, address emerging cyber threats, and expand into digital products. The pace of change and evolving exposures require all market participants to have a robust and forward-looking risk and controls assessment framework to measure and mitigate these novel risks in line with each firm’s risk appetite. Risk management must continue to be a proactive discipline, rather than a defensive function.
Rebecca Ashton, Head of DTCC Consulting
As we move into 2026, the post-trade landscape is shifting fast, bringing significant challenges across the financial ecosystem. Whether it's U.S. Treasury clearing, accelerated settlement, 24x5 trading, Artificial Intelligence (AI), or tokenization, organizations are under pressure to modernize while managing tighter margins. The question isn't whether to act, but what to prioritize. In this environment, those who can transform their back-office infrastructure from a cost center into a competitive advantage will be best positioned to navigate what's ahead. But that kind of transformation requires more than traditional consulting—it requires a partner with direct operational experience in post-trade infrastructure.
This is where DTCC Consulting holds a unique position in the industry. We sit at the center of the global post-trade ecosystem, processing $3.8 quadrillion in securities annually across Equities, Treasuries, ETFs, and more. We bring the deepest domain expertise in the industry to these issues, based on over 50 years of experience leading large-scale, industry-wide implementations as well as enhancements to market structure. We also bring DTCC's extensive industry network and institutional knowledge to every client engagement, along with product and operations experts from FICC, ITP, and RDS who have hands-on experience in the systems and processes our clients are working to improve.
In 2026 and beyond, we’re excited to keep evolving and enhancing our services for our clients.
Michele Hillery, Managing Director and Head of Repository and Derivatives Services
In 2026, financial institutions will continue to face regulatory change around derivatives trade reporting requirements, with more updates expected in North America and a continued global regulatory focus on data quality. Financial institutions will be conducting impact analyses of their current processes, as multiple regulators introduce proposals for simplification and burden reduction. These evolving initiatives will drive firms to further modernize their data and reporting infrastructures to ensure they remain compliant and can adapt to change.
This year, DTCC supported successful implementation of the Canadian and HKMA trade reporting rewrites as well as schema changes in Europe, continued regulatory advocacy across major DTCC reporting jurisdictions, and migrated trade ingestion to the Cloud.
DTCC Repository & Derivatives Services will continue to support clients with the tools and insights needed to adapt to evolving reporting mandates, including our new MiFIR Approved Reporting Mechanism (ARM) service, Trade Reporting Analytics, and our advanced testing simulator that enhances data validation.
Talia Klein, Managing Director and Head of Wealth Management Services
Looking to 2026, we are seeing structural trends continue to converge: accelerated growth in private markets, heightened demand for seamless digital experiences, and the continued evolution of the wealth ecosystem due to shifting demographics. The approval of the ETF dual share class model, the growth in guaranteed income products, and the desire for expanded access to alternative assets are creating significant momentum and reinforcing the need for a modernized infrastructure that not only bridges the gaps but does so in a way that drives operational efficiency and innovation at scale.
At DTCC, the size and scale of the network we support across wealth products, including mutual funds, insurance products, and the expanding private markets ecosystem, is unmatched. This singular position allows us to act as a catalyst for the industry’s next chapter. We are focused on enabling market participants to achieve their diverse set of growth objectives by simplifying processes, reducing risk, and unlocking new opportunities.
Our strategy to not only modernize our platforms but deliver growth opportunities for our clients — anchored in consistency, transparency, and scale — is already delivering real value. For example, upcoming enhancements to Fund/SERV will integrate ETF and mutual fund processing, ultimately reducing cycle times and enabling real-time data sharing. This is one important example of our commitment to advancing the infrastructure that empowers firms to innovate with confidence and meet rising expectations of the market.
Tim Lind, Managing Director of DTCC Data Services
In 2026, the volume, complexity, and speed of market data will surge as new technologies reshape the landscape, making the ability to convert raw data into actionable intelligence more critical than ever. Market participants who harness data effectively will gain a decisive advantage in navigating change and driving innovation.
For decades, the industry has operated in an environment where data fragmentation, manual intervention and inconsistent standards create barriers to efficiency and insight. At DTCC, we are reimagining the future of market data—leveraging automation, artificial intelligence and emerging technologies to deliver accurate, timely and actionable information. By championing a unified, authoritative data infrastructure, the industry can accelerate decision-making, enhance transparency and unlock new sources of value.
In the year ahead, our priority is to lead this transformation in close collaboration with clients and market participants—modernizing the data ecosystem to build a more resilient, transparent, and connected market infrastructure that empowers the entire financial industry.
