With one year to go until the UK and EU transition to T+1 settlement, industry experts are urging firms to move beyond automation and focus on exception management, data infrastructure, and the road to atomic settlement.
As the deadline approaches, two senior voices in the post-trade space have outlined the key challenges firms must address in the coming months.
Exception Management Must Take Centre Stage
James Maxfield, Chief Client Officer at Duco, argues that while automation has dominated much of the conversation around T+1 readiness, firms risk overlooking a critical piece of the puzzle: what happens when things go wrong.
"Zero exceptions is an admirable goal but highly unrealistic," Maxfield warned. "Firms need to go beyond automating post-trade activities like allocation and address the question of who, or what, is in charge when something doesn't match up at 22:00 on trade date, and how fast they can act."
Maxfield points to the growing use of 24/7 AI agents as a promising solution, with some firms already deploying them to investigate and resolve exceptions in real time - reducing the risk of activity spikes and enabling firms to manage exceptions at scale.
"T+1 will not be the end point either," he added. "The work that firms do now to build smarter post-trade operations will also put them in a much stronger position for any future move towards T0."
Fragmented Data Poses a Critical Risk
Richard Baker, Founder and CEO of Tokenovate, highlights a separate but equally pressing concern: the state of firms' data and infrastructure.
According to Tokenovate's latest research, only 32% of respondents say their organisations are fully prepared with compatible workflows, systems, and operations already in place. More strikingly, 88% identified fragmented data as a significant or critical challenge to post-trade efficiency.
"Fragmented data, manual hand-offs and exceptions are already a challenge," Baker said. "With significantly less time to resolve them, they will become a much bigger problem."
Baker urges firms to use the T+1 transition as an opportunity to join up automation across the trade lifecycle, standardise transaction and event data, and keep the legal and economic terms of a trade connected through to settlement.
Eyes Already on Atomic Settlement
Both executives agree that T+1 is not the finish line. Tokenovate's research suggests the industry expects widespread atomic settlement in the UK within an average of 3.7 years — meaning the infrastructure decisions firms make today will have long-lasting consequences.
"Common standards will be essential to ensuring those systems can interoperate across the market," Baker noted. "The changes being made today need to support a future where cash, assets and obligations can move together across different infrastructures."
With twelve months to go, the message from both leaders is clear: the time to act is now.
