At Sibos in Miami, industry leaders gathered for the flagship View from the Top session; the focus turned to the true engine of financial market transformation: post-trade infrastructure.
Hosted by our founder and Chair, Julia Streets, MBE, the session featured Stephanie Eckermann, Executive Board Member at Deutsche Börse Group and Chairwoman of Clearstream, who outlined how financial market infrastructures (FMIs) are deploying next-generation technologies to connect traditional and digital markets at institutional scale.
Rather than developing in isolation, key technologies, including distributed ledger technology (DLT), cloud computing, data analytics, and artificial intelligence, are converging simultaneously. To harness this convergence without disrupting ongoing market operations, global market infrastructures are moving away from isolated sandbox testing toward a “digital-first, hybrid-by-design” operating model.
The concept of hybrid finance acts as a practical bridge between traditional securities, digital assets, and digital cash within a single portfolio. Eckermann illustrated this transition using the analogy of a hybrid car, which seamlessly switches between an electric motor and a combustion engine depending on whether the driver is on a short city trip or a long-distance highway. In post-trade, a hybrid model allows institutional clients to hold traditional securities, tokenised assets, and digital cash side-by-side, switching between rails based on specific use cases without altering their core operational workflows.
This approach is already operating in live production. Clearstream is taking its D7 digital securities platform beyond initial experimentation, expanding it across asset classes and the full securities lifecycle. To date, D7 has processed more than 4.5 million digital issuances with a total volume exceeding €100 billion.
However, full market digitisation will not happen overnight. With €23 trillion in securities and funds sitting on Clearstream’s books, and hundreds of trillions anchored in traditional rails globally, market participants will operate in a hybrid environment for at least the next 5 to 10 years as legacy systems and market participants transition at their own pace.
A critical theme of the debate was the fundamental difference between retail and institutional finance. While retail applications prioritise individual customisation and proximity to the end-consumer, institutional markets depend on network effects, central liquidity pools, netting, and capital efficiency.
Applying decentralised technology for its own sake risks destroying these essential economics. DLT and blockchain benefits cannot compensate for the loss of central netting and liquidity unless combined with institutional central logic. For example, in central clearing, the core economic value stems from risk sharing and diversification, which inherently requires a centralised framework.
To unlock genuine commercial value, institutions must target high-value post-trade friction points, specifically collateral and capital management optimisation. By moving beyond technology for technology’s sake and applying smart contracts across hybrid lending, borrowing, and securities financing rails, institutions can automate lifecycle servicing, increase collateral mobility, and directly reduce balance sheet costs.
As decentralised networks expand, regulated market infrastructures remain the essential foundation of institutional confidence. Institutional trust relies on strict regulatory governance, robust cybersecurity standards, AML/KYC compliance, operational risk management, and enforceable legal settlement finality.
Eckermann highlighted Clearstream’s 50-year track record without losing a single ISIN as an example of the baseline operational certainty required in institutional capital markets, a level of legal finality that does not yet exist in unregulated crypto environments. Furthermore, regulated FMIs serve as neutral standard-setters and connectors across more than 60 international jurisdictions, helping global clients manage cross-border regulatory differences and geopolitical volatility.
To achieve scale, modernisation projects must avoid the trap of building isolated platforms from scratch. Failed transformation initiatives often attempt to build entirely “new houses” that cannot connect to legacy rails. Successful infrastructure expansion means “building new rooms on an existing house”, using APIs, SWIFT messaging logic, and ISO 20022 data standards to ensure full end-to-end interoperability with traditional systems.
Achieving this requires active, cross-sector collaboration across the ecosystem:
As the pace of technology adoption accelerates, market participants risk committing strategic errors by skipping foundational steps:
Closing the discussion, Eckermann issued a clear operational call to action for executive leadership. In an environment where AI and digital transformation are moving significantly faster than previous technology cycles, leaders cannot afford to manage change passively.
To successfully guide their organisations through this shift, leaders must execute across three priorities:
