Unlock next-generation, real-time technology to supercharge securities processing
By Mack Gill, Head of Securities Processing, FIS Capital Markets
Post-trade operations are under pressure. As settlement cycles continue to shorten and asset classes multiply, competition is intensifying among securities processing providers.
Whether you’re processing securities, derivatives or digital assets, you must manage the trade lifecycle more efficiently to increase your volumes and fee income so your money works harder. With your growth depending on it, there’s no room for costly operational inefficiencies, risks or errors.
It’s time to reassess your landscape of post-trade technology. In a new age of securities processing, only the most powerful solutions will allow you to supercharge your operations and respond to the three toughest challenges facing your business.
Challenge #1: Competitive threats are rising
A new generation of digitally driven trading firms and fintechs are disrupting the post-trade processing market and winning business from traditional investment banks, broker-dealers and market makers.
But the industry’s digital transformation is also setting new standards for post-trade processing. With investors expecting technology-powered efficiency throughout the trading lifecycle, modernised but compliant operations and seamlessly automated processes have become a must-have for attracting and retaining buy-side, institutional and retail customers.
If your post-trade systems aren’t firing on all cylinders, you may struggle to compete for market share and earn the fees you need to keep money at work and maximize growth.
Response #1: Power up to win and retain business
For competitive advantage in post-trade processing, an event-driven, real-time cloud-based platform of powerful next-generation technology will help you manage higher volumes and make your money work harder.
With modernised middle- and back-office operations, you’re in a stronger position to:
- Boost efficiency: Straight-through process trades in real time while maintaining regulatory compliance.
- Process faster: Accelerate settlement across multiple assets, entities, markets and currencies.
- Improve accuracy: Support real-time reconciliation.
- Enhance service: Keep up with extended trading hours.
- Increase transparency: Provide up-to-the-minute insight for well-informed decisions.
Challenge #2: High costs and risks are squeezing margins
Your trading organisation needs to keep its fees competitive and its margins healthy. That means minimising your costs per trade by maximising your efficiency.
But fragmented legacy systems and manual processes hamper the efficiency and accuracy of your operations, increasing not only daily overhead but also the risk of costly penalties for failed settlement.
Continued use of legacy technology adds to these costs, creates more vulnerabilities in post-trade processing and increases your reliance on expensive key individuals who understand your systems best. But you still don’t have the solutions to manage the post-trade lifecycle and match trades in real time – or grow your business without investing in more resources.
Response #2: Streamline operations to slash overhead and risk
By consolidating and streamlining your technology, you can simplify your operations and focus on driving growth, better serving customers and putting money to work.
Modern, SaaS-based, well-integrated systems and a unified approach to cross-asset processing allow you to:
- Reduce cost, risk and complexity: Slash total cost of ownership and key person risk; eliminate the costs of managing multiple systems and vendors; protect your organisation from cyberthreats; and reduce manual workarounds, operational risks and errors.
- Do more for less: Gain unprecedented processing power and scalability – without the in-house effort of running the technology on-premise.
- Access an ecosystem: Tap into integrated middle- and back-office capabilities, from accounting, securities lending and corporate actions processing to collateral management, treasury and data management.
- Seamlessly automate processes: Power real-time processing for less cost across a full range of asset classes – or outsource your whole post-trade operation to a business-process-as-a-service (BPaaS) solution.
Challenge #3: Market change is accelerating
Trading keeps changing, so agile post-trade operations are key to your growth. As jurisdictions move to T+1 settlement and beyond, you need to easily meet their different regulations. With the rise of digital and tokenised assets, your organisation must also be able to support new business models and reporting needs for investors.
As the world of trading continues to expand, technology must be able to take the strain. It’s critical that your systems not only handle new asset classes but also fluctuating trade volumes in volatile markets.
More and more assets are being traded all the time, with different, complex operational requirements. There are security concerns to manage and data sovereignty requirements to meet, too.
You need more capabilities to catch up with the market – but you can’t further complicate your IT landscape by adding more systems.
Response #3: Move to the cloud to drive agility and growth
A modular, cloud-based architecture is vital to turbocharging performance, so you can keep ahead of market change, grease the wheels of growth and make money work harder.
With agile, componentised technology, you’re better able to:
- Expand your capabilities: Process every type of security, derivative and digital asset in real time; support more trading strategies and new markets; and scale to growing volumes of accounts and trades.
- Modernise incrementally: Introduce new middle- and back-office components in line with changing business needs.
- Achieve compliance: More easily meet different regulations for settlements, data sovereignty and reporting globally.
- Gain flexibility: Configure systems quickly to the next market requirement, whether T+1, T+0 or 24/7 trading; and gain a more automated modern approach to implementing, integrating and extending software.
- Integrate solutions: Effortlessly connect via real-time APIs to external and internal systems, including distributed ledger technology.
- Improve resilience and security: Keep solutions available but protected 24/7 – and always running on the latest version of software.
Unlock the power of next-gen post trade technology
Today’s post trade operations need a lot of power behind them – and only modern technology can provide that power. It takes a global, real-time, cross-asset processing cloud platform to help you win and retain business, drive out inefficiencies, better manage risk and outpace market change. Are you ready to supercharge securities processing to make your money work harder?
Mack Gill is Head of Securities Processing for FIS’ Capital Markets business, where he is responsible for global post-trade solutions for the securities markets. Previously, he was COO of Torstone Technology, a leading global SaaS platform for post-trade processing, now part of FIS®. Having worked in the financial technology industry since 1994, Mack was also CEO of MillenniumIT, part of the London Stock Exchange Group. He was named among the world’s Top 25 FinTech Innovators by Harrington Starr, and one of the Top Trading Technology Leaders by Institutional Investor Magazine.
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