The year innovation drives organisational and infrastructure change in asset servicing
21 Jan 2026
In the second part of our looking forward series, industry leaders predict the core forces and technological developments that will steer the industry in 2026
Image: rawpixel/stock.adobe.com
Payments
Anish Kapoor, CEO of AccessPay
Doing more with less will be at the forefront of corporate finance and treasury leaders’ minds as we enter 2026. The macroeconomic backdrop is difficult, which means the drive for automation and finance optimisation will reach new heights. AI will inevitably play a growing role in automation efforts, but in the near term, its role will be limited to targeted tasks rather than full-scale payment automation where the stakes are high. However, AI is not the only technology in town; other solutions also exist to optimise payment flows.
ISO 20022 is an enduring theme. November 2026 will be a milestone month, as Clearing House Automated Payment System (CHAPS) in the UK and Swift begin rejecting payment messages with unstructured addresses. For corporates, this is where a failure to get to grips with ISO 20022 could hit them hard for the first time. Cyber recovery planning for payment systems will also be high on the agenda following prominent cyberattacks in 2025. Finally, cross-border payments will be the hot space to watch thanks to the upgrades to the UK’s real-time gross settlement infrastructure (RT2) completed in 2025 and the explosion of activity in the stablecoin space, which could have significant long-term implications for corporate payments.
Nick Jones, Founder and CEO of Zumo
Five predictions that will shape the digital assets sector in 2026
Compliance gets heavy - but unlocks the UK market opportunity at new scale
The UK Financial Conduct Authority’s (FCA) long-awaited crypto roadmap will start becoming real-world policy in 2026. In comes investment firm style financial services regulation, out goes the offshore business model.
Hot on the heels of the regulator’s decision to lift its retail ban on certain crypto exchange traded products (ETPs), it’s a watershed moment for the sector. Finally, there will be defined operating rules and the clarity to scale. But it’s also the time providers will have to get serious about setting up regulated presences in the UK. Well capitalised, regulated firms will be able to profit from the UK market at a new mass scale, while others retreat.
GBP stablecoins make inroads into the heavily dollarised global market
The GENIUS Act has had a profound impact in the US, with estimates suggesting 99 per cent of the total stablecoin market capitalisation is now dollarised. Spurred into action, the FCA and Bank of England have proposed stablecoin rules that will help UK firms tap into this important growth market.
The FCA has firmly set its stall out with a new stablecoin sandbox targeted towards enabling payments innovation. The Bank of England will offer large-scale stablecoin issuers direct accounts – a step taken neither in the EU or the US in developing their respective regimes – and is preparing now for a future in which stablecoins are used in payments at a systemic scale. These are bold and differentiated moves that point to the closest convergence of private sector digital assets and public finance seen to date. Sterling stablecoins will be fully backed, regulated, and issued onshore. Quiet, boring for some, but ultimately transformative for payments.
Crypto becomes a standardised asset class.
Just a month after the FCA lifted its ban on retail access to crypto exchange-traded notes (ETNs) in October 2025, the London Stock Exchange recorded US$280 million in trading volume, ranking it third in Europe behind Xetra and SIX Swiss Exchange.
ETPs will continue to grow their footprint rapidly in line with developing regulatory certainty. They enable investors to gain increased exposure to the price movements of cryptocurrencies without having to worry about custody, with investments physically backed and held across multiple Big Capital custodians.
Expect to see family offices and private wealth managers getting more involved, making crypto a standard part of the investment portfolio. Recent industry research by broker EXANTE reveals a third of family offices now hold crypto assets, with clearer regulatory regimes in the US, EU, and UK helping to legitimise the sector – and expected to drive allocations ever higher.”
Retail apps enter an age of consolidation
Crypto apps will consolidate, driven by increasing regulatory pressures that raise compliance costs and put up barriers to entry. This will result in fewer – but more robust – players.
The maturing crypto market is piquing interest among dealmakers, with fintechs in particular sizing up the sector. In 2025 we saw a number of major deals, including Stripe’s acquisition of stablecoin payment platform Bridge and Robinhood’s purchase of crypto exchange Bitstamp. Expect to see a spike in M&A activity in 2026, especially among exchanges, brokerages, and other service providers.
The next Coinbase or Revolut? They’re already in the market, waiting. Don’t be surprised, too, to see these super-apps branching out – into new forms of payments, tokenised asset holdings, and even non-financial applications.
Smart companies will build during the bear market
Historically, Bitcoin’s performance follows a four-year cycle, experiencing significant bull runs followed by sharp price corrections. There are typically clear omens for the end of a cycle – presently it’s the proliferation of meme coins that suggests people are running out of ideas, while previously non-fungible tokens (NFTs) have been the augur.
The winners in the next cycle will be the firms that have invested and built through the bear market. Revolut, Blackrock, and Binance, for example, have all done it well, launching new products in new markets and deepening liquidity.
Now is the time for ambitious firms to explore the new partnerships that will help them with market entry.
Fund Services
Oisin McClenaghan, Partner and Head of the Investment Funds Ogier, Dublin
The assets under management (AUM) of Irish domiciled funds increased by a remarkable 22 per cent in 2024. Significantly, 42 per cent of that growth is attributable to alternative investment funds (AIFs).
Given the comprehensive enhancements to the Irish private assets and alternatives product, and the tax offering currently in train, our expectation is that we will continue to see strong growth in Irish domiciled AIFs in the coming years, as well as continued significant growth in understandings for collective investment in transferable securities (UCITS), including ETFs.
We are currently seeing significant enhancements to our private assets and AIF offering, being delivered by way of the current AIF Rulebook overhaul.
The consultation includes enhanced loan origination flexibilities, Alternative Investment Fund Managers Directive (AIFMD II) alignment without any gold plating, substantial additional subsidiary and downstream structures flexibilities, simplification of AIF financing arrangements, greater side-letter flexibility and regulatory streamlining. This is a significant enhancement to the Irish private assets offering.
From an Irish perspective, the new AIFMD II loan origination regime is widely welcomed and a positive development, introducing new flexibilities into the Irish framework for AIFs directly engaging in loan origination.
The new regime replaces in full the legacy Irish L-QIAIF regime and is being implemented in Ireland without any gold plating. This is also greatly welcomed. Coupled with the compelling advantages of the Irish-US tax treaty, we expect continued significant growth in Irish loan origination AIFs in the coming years.
Both the Central Bank and the Department of Finance deserve credit for their proactive follow-through on the recommendations contained in the Funds Sector 2030 review.
In the last 12 months we’ve seen significant enhancements to our ETF regime with both ETF share class flexibilities and the significant new ability to disclose portfolio holdings on a quarterly basis instead of daily.
We’ve also seen additional AIF flexibilities in the context of AIFs guaranteeing third party debts introduced in the Central Bank’s AIFMD Q and A and with the current AIF Rulebook overhaul, we will have a substantial enhancement to the Irish private equity and alternatives product offering.
Add the withholding tax exemption for upstream payments to investment limited partnerships (ILPs) contained in the current Finance Bill to the picture and collectively it points to a serious commitment to, and delivery on, the recommendations arising from the Funds Sector 2030 review.
Data services
Michiel Verhoeven, CEO, Xceptor
AI: In 2026, AI adoption will continue to dominate headlines. Yet, without a clear strategy, institutions risk creating a money pit. Firms should ask themselves: “What are our pain points and how can we achieve the necessary outcomes with AI?”. Without the right infrastructure, data management, and clarity of purpose, technology is not a magic fix.
For example, AI can drastically reduce time spent extracting information from complex tax documents, and agentic AI could augment productivity further by proactively solving problems and triggering downstream actions. But without addressing inconsistent data formats, firms will face more errors and time spent correcting them, or even financial and non-compliance risks. Issues with data reliability, quality, and flow are common causes of failed AI projects – flawed data creates flawed AI. Firms must invest in platforms that normalise, enrich, and validate data across fragmented systems before scaling AI projects.”
Regulation: Regulatory demands across the trade lifecycle will only get tougher. Pre-trade, firms must ensure compliance before execution. Enhanced market data analytics and real-time risk controls are critical for best execution and effective surveillance under regulations like MiFID II and MAR.
Post-trade, the shift to T+1 settlement cycles is magnifying inefficiencies. Issues that once took two days to fix must now be resolved in one. Automation, exception handling, and adaptive rule engines are essential to avoid settlement fails and penalties, while reconciliation and reporting must be digitised and auditable for transparency across the custody chain. With the FCA’s warning about readiness for Europe’s T+1 deadline (11 October 2027), and lessons learned from the US transition, firms must not delay action.
Tax reporting is also being digitised under mandates like Germany’s MiKaDiv (1 January 2027) and the EU’s FASTER Directive (1 January 2030). Manual processes will be a huge barrier. Firms must assess their data models, reporting gaps, and custody chain transparency, then automate their tax reporting and compliance processes. This will reduce manual effort and risk, while ensuring readiness for these timelines.
Marc Mallett, Chief Commercial Officer, GoldenSource
Assets under custody continue to rise, but the growth story in private markets is creating a very different operating environment for asset servicers. As managers expand into private credit, infrastructure, and semi-liquid structures like Long-Term Investment Funds (LTIFs) and Long-Term Asset Fund (LTAFs), the underlying operational demands increase sharply. These assets introduce irregular cash flows, bespoke valuation cycles and far more complex data requirements. At the same time, active managers are facing sustained margin pressure, which ultimately flows upstream and puts additional stress on servicing fees.
To keep pace, asset servicers will need to strengthen their ability to support this new generation of private-market products at scale. That means handling capital-call activity, cash-flow schedules, waterfall mechanics, valuation inputs, and look-through data with far greater precision and automation. These workflows were never designed for legacy mutual-fund infrastructures, and administrators are already feeling the strain. The firms that modernise their data foundations will be far better equipped to support managers as private markets continue to broaden into retail and wealth channels.
As these trends accelerate, one of the most promising growth areas for asset servicers lies in becoming the data backbone for clients’ private-market expansion. Managers need cleaner, better-structured data to run liquidity processes, oversee valuations, and report exposures across increasingly complex portfolios. Asset servicers that can aggregate, quality-check and warehouse private-asset data — not just the data they produce themselves — will be positioned to deliver higher-value oversight, analytics, and reporting services.
The opportunity is clear: the winners will be the providers that solve the data challenge behind private-market scale.
Clément Miglietti, Chief Product Officer and Chief Technology Officer, NeoXam
The most striking shift has been the real, practical use of AI across private markets. After a decade of talk and tentative pilots, 2025 has been the year firms finally put it to work. A revival in dealmaking and a broader wave of investor activity created the perfect test case, and AI delivered. For a part of the industry known for limited visibility and sluggish reporting, it marked the first time technology genuinely started to close the gap.
The sheer volume and variety of data now flowing through private markets makes manual processing impossible. More documents, more valuation inputs, more noise, and more mismatches in timing have pushed firms toward machine-learning tools that can sift, structure, and reconcile information at scale. AI is becoming the backbone for portfolio-wide data standards, joined-up analytics, and reliable insight that spans both public and private assets.
The momentum is only going one way. With private markets on track to generate more than half of global asset management revenues, firms that hesitate risk being overwhelmed by the data. The next phase will focus on deeper automation, sharper forecasting, and a level of transparency once considered out of reach.
Helen Adair, Chief Product Officer, Taskize
2026 puts legacy post-trade workflows under real strain for UK investment managers
European market infrastructure is heading into a demanding year as the shift to T+1 becomes real rather than theoretical. The regulator has made its expectations clear that firms will be held to account. The larger banks and custodians have already moved into execution mode, applying lessons from the US transition back in 2024. However, the real pressure point sits with smaller asset managers and alternative funds that have long relied on comfortable timelines and manual processes. Two-day settlement allowed for email chains, spreadsheets and people-led workarounds. One day does not.
The challenge is structural rather than cosmetic. The interaction between investment managers and their service providers is where most breaks occur, and this interaction still depends heavily on outdated tools. Lean teams simply cannot absorb higher volumes or faster turnaround times without improved workflows. Yet the solution does not require a wholesale rebuild of operating models. Practical, targeted upgrades can make a significant difference.
Collaboration platforms, self-service tools and API-driven data access can replace slow manual exchanges and give firms a more resilient footing. If smaller managers prioritise these changes in 2026, they will find implementing FCA guidance far easier, and they will be better positioned to meet the demands of T+1 with confidence.
Cybersecurity
Dr Ruth Wandhofer, Head of European Markets at Blackwired
Future significant threats in cybersecurity include increased AI-driven attack sophistication, an expanding digital attack surface, workforce and IT fragmentation, abuse of trusted infrastructure such as cloud platforms, onchain cybercrime, and quantum-turbocharged attacks. Third-party and supply chain cybersecurity risks remain among the most critical challenges. A vulnerability that is largely overlooked but will rise in importance in 2026 is shadow AI, the uncontrolled use of open source and commercial large language models, where employees feed these models with confidential corporate information to simplify their workload.
Emerging technologies such as advanced AI, deepfake detection, zero trust frameworks, and quantum-resistant cryptography will offer more robust defence against increasingly sophisticated cyber-attacks in 2026. The shift toward hybrid and cloud-native environments calls for unified, cloud-agnostic security frameworks and real-time monitoring to address visibility gaps and privilege management challenges. Key to success is a paradigm shift from the old ‘detect and respond’ to ‘predict, prevent and defeat’. Autonomous defence systems must integrate advanced AI for real-time threat detection to obtain critical data on threat actors and their campaigns before they decide to strike.
Ben Goldin, Founder and CEO of Plumery
A trend that will continue gaining momentum throughout 2026 is the shift from customer-first to human-first banking, which aims to get even closer to the customer by understanding their human needs, rather than consumer needs. For example, instead of solely advising on which banking products they should buy, a bank can act as a coach to improve a customer’s financial health. Applying hyperpersonalisation in this way, banks can build trust in the digital realm through tailored and empathetic interactions.
While institutions have been exploring what is possible, relevant and achievable within the banking context using generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), 2026 will see more practical actions and initiatives, such as conversational applications in the front and back office. Using the technology to improve efficiency and help staff do more value-add work will have a positive impact on customer experience, as processes will take much less time. It will also help drive financial inclusion by providing data-driven insights to support faster and smarter decisions, making it cheaper to serve atypical customer segments.
Anish Kapoor, CEO of AccessPay
Doing more with less will be at the forefront of corporate finance and treasury leaders’ minds as we enter 2026. The macroeconomic backdrop is difficult, which means the drive for automation and finance optimisation will reach new heights. AI will inevitably play a growing role in automation efforts, but in the near term, its role will be limited to targeted tasks rather than full-scale payment automation where the stakes are high. However, AI is not the only technology in town; other solutions also exist to optimise payment flows.
ISO 20022 is an enduring theme. November 2026 will be a milestone month, as Clearing House Automated Payment System (CHAPS) in the UK and Swift begin rejecting payment messages with unstructured addresses. For corporates, this is where a failure to get to grips with ISO 20022 could hit them hard for the first time. Cyber recovery planning for payment systems will also be high on the agenda following prominent cyberattacks in 2025. Finally, cross-border payments will be the hot space to watch thanks to the upgrades to the UK’s real-time gross settlement infrastructure (RT2) completed in 2025 and the explosion of activity in the stablecoin space, which could have significant long-term implications for corporate payments.
Nick Jones, Founder and CEO of Zumo
Five predictions that will shape the digital assets sector in 2026
Compliance gets heavy - but unlocks the UK market opportunity at new scale
The UK Financial Conduct Authority’s (FCA) long-awaited crypto roadmap will start becoming real-world policy in 2026. In comes investment firm style financial services regulation, out goes the offshore business model.
Hot on the heels of the regulator’s decision to lift its retail ban on certain crypto exchange traded products (ETPs), it’s a watershed moment for the sector. Finally, there will be defined operating rules and the clarity to scale. But it’s also the time providers will have to get serious about setting up regulated presences in the UK. Well capitalised, regulated firms will be able to profit from the UK market at a new mass scale, while others retreat.
GBP stablecoins make inroads into the heavily dollarised global market
The GENIUS Act has had a profound impact in the US, with estimates suggesting 99 per cent of the total stablecoin market capitalisation is now dollarised. Spurred into action, the FCA and Bank of England have proposed stablecoin rules that will help UK firms tap into this important growth market.
The FCA has firmly set its stall out with a new stablecoin sandbox targeted towards enabling payments innovation. The Bank of England will offer large-scale stablecoin issuers direct accounts – a step taken neither in the EU or the US in developing their respective regimes – and is preparing now for a future in which stablecoins are used in payments at a systemic scale. These are bold and differentiated moves that point to the closest convergence of private sector digital assets and public finance seen to date. Sterling stablecoins will be fully backed, regulated, and issued onshore. Quiet, boring for some, but ultimately transformative for payments.
Crypto becomes a standardised asset class.
Just a month after the FCA lifted its ban on retail access to crypto exchange-traded notes (ETNs) in October 2025, the London Stock Exchange recorded US$280 million in trading volume, ranking it third in Europe behind Xetra and SIX Swiss Exchange.
ETPs will continue to grow their footprint rapidly in line with developing regulatory certainty. They enable investors to gain increased exposure to the price movements of cryptocurrencies without having to worry about custody, with investments physically backed and held across multiple Big Capital custodians.
Expect to see family offices and private wealth managers getting more involved, making crypto a standard part of the investment portfolio. Recent industry research by broker EXANTE reveals a third of family offices now hold crypto assets, with clearer regulatory regimes in the US, EU, and UK helping to legitimise the sector – and expected to drive allocations ever higher.”
Retail apps enter an age of consolidation
Crypto apps will consolidate, driven by increasing regulatory pressures that raise compliance costs and put up barriers to entry. This will result in fewer – but more robust – players.
The maturing crypto market is piquing interest among dealmakers, with fintechs in particular sizing up the sector. In 2025 we saw a number of major deals, including Stripe’s acquisition of stablecoin payment platform Bridge and Robinhood’s purchase of crypto exchange Bitstamp. Expect to see a spike in M&A activity in 2026, especially among exchanges, brokerages, and other service providers.
The next Coinbase or Revolut? They’re already in the market, waiting. Don’t be surprised, too, to see these super-apps branching out – into new forms of payments, tokenised asset holdings, and even non-financial applications.
Smart companies will build during the bear market
Historically, Bitcoin’s performance follows a four-year cycle, experiencing significant bull runs followed by sharp price corrections. There are typically clear omens for the end of a cycle – presently it’s the proliferation of meme coins that suggests people are running out of ideas, while previously non-fungible tokens (NFTs) have been the augur.
The winners in the next cycle will be the firms that have invested and built through the bear market. Revolut, Blackrock, and Binance, for example, have all done it well, launching new products in new markets and deepening liquidity.
Now is the time for ambitious firms to explore the new partnerships that will help them with market entry.
Fund Services
Oisin McClenaghan, Partner and Head of the Investment Funds Ogier, Dublin
The assets under management (AUM) of Irish domiciled funds increased by a remarkable 22 per cent in 2024. Significantly, 42 per cent of that growth is attributable to alternative investment funds (AIFs).
Given the comprehensive enhancements to the Irish private assets and alternatives product, and the tax offering currently in train, our expectation is that we will continue to see strong growth in Irish domiciled AIFs in the coming years, as well as continued significant growth in understandings for collective investment in transferable securities (UCITS), including ETFs.
We are currently seeing significant enhancements to our private assets and AIF offering, being delivered by way of the current AIF Rulebook overhaul.
The consultation includes enhanced loan origination flexibilities, Alternative Investment Fund Managers Directive (AIFMD II) alignment without any gold plating, substantial additional subsidiary and downstream structures flexibilities, simplification of AIF financing arrangements, greater side-letter flexibility and regulatory streamlining. This is a significant enhancement to the Irish private assets offering.
From an Irish perspective, the new AIFMD II loan origination regime is widely welcomed and a positive development, introducing new flexibilities into the Irish framework for AIFs directly engaging in loan origination.
The new regime replaces in full the legacy Irish L-QIAIF regime and is being implemented in Ireland without any gold plating. This is also greatly welcomed. Coupled with the compelling advantages of the Irish-US tax treaty, we expect continued significant growth in Irish loan origination AIFs in the coming years.
Both the Central Bank and the Department of Finance deserve credit for their proactive follow-through on the recommendations contained in the Funds Sector 2030 review.
In the last 12 months we’ve seen significant enhancements to our ETF regime with both ETF share class flexibilities and the significant new ability to disclose portfolio holdings on a quarterly basis instead of daily.
We’ve also seen additional AIF flexibilities in the context of AIFs guaranteeing third party debts introduced in the Central Bank’s AIFMD Q and A and with the current AIF Rulebook overhaul, we will have a substantial enhancement to the Irish private equity and alternatives product offering.
Add the withholding tax exemption for upstream payments to investment limited partnerships (ILPs) contained in the current Finance Bill to the picture and collectively it points to a serious commitment to, and delivery on, the recommendations arising from the Funds Sector 2030 review.
Data services
Michiel Verhoeven, CEO, Xceptor
AI: In 2026, AI adoption will continue to dominate headlines. Yet, without a clear strategy, institutions risk creating a money pit. Firms should ask themselves: “What are our pain points and how can we achieve the necessary outcomes with AI?”. Without the right infrastructure, data management, and clarity of purpose, technology is not a magic fix.
For example, AI can drastically reduce time spent extracting information from complex tax documents, and agentic AI could augment productivity further by proactively solving problems and triggering downstream actions. But without addressing inconsistent data formats, firms will face more errors and time spent correcting them, or even financial and non-compliance risks. Issues with data reliability, quality, and flow are common causes of failed AI projects – flawed data creates flawed AI. Firms must invest in platforms that normalise, enrich, and validate data across fragmented systems before scaling AI projects.”
Regulation: Regulatory demands across the trade lifecycle will only get tougher. Pre-trade, firms must ensure compliance before execution. Enhanced market data analytics and real-time risk controls are critical for best execution and effective surveillance under regulations like MiFID II and MAR.
Post-trade, the shift to T+1 settlement cycles is magnifying inefficiencies. Issues that once took two days to fix must now be resolved in one. Automation, exception handling, and adaptive rule engines are essential to avoid settlement fails and penalties, while reconciliation and reporting must be digitised and auditable for transparency across the custody chain. With the FCA’s warning about readiness for Europe’s T+1 deadline (11 October 2027), and lessons learned from the US transition, firms must not delay action.
Tax reporting is also being digitised under mandates like Germany’s MiKaDiv (1 January 2027) and the EU’s FASTER Directive (1 January 2030). Manual processes will be a huge barrier. Firms must assess their data models, reporting gaps, and custody chain transparency, then automate their tax reporting and compliance processes. This will reduce manual effort and risk, while ensuring readiness for these timelines.
Marc Mallett, Chief Commercial Officer, GoldenSource
Assets under custody continue to rise, but the growth story in private markets is creating a very different operating environment for asset servicers. As managers expand into private credit, infrastructure, and semi-liquid structures like Long-Term Investment Funds (LTIFs) and Long-Term Asset Fund (LTAFs), the underlying operational demands increase sharply. These assets introduce irregular cash flows, bespoke valuation cycles and far more complex data requirements. At the same time, active managers are facing sustained margin pressure, which ultimately flows upstream and puts additional stress on servicing fees.
To keep pace, asset servicers will need to strengthen their ability to support this new generation of private-market products at scale. That means handling capital-call activity, cash-flow schedules, waterfall mechanics, valuation inputs, and look-through data with far greater precision and automation. These workflows were never designed for legacy mutual-fund infrastructures, and administrators are already feeling the strain. The firms that modernise their data foundations will be far better equipped to support managers as private markets continue to broaden into retail and wealth channels.
As these trends accelerate, one of the most promising growth areas for asset servicers lies in becoming the data backbone for clients’ private-market expansion. Managers need cleaner, better-structured data to run liquidity processes, oversee valuations, and report exposures across increasingly complex portfolios. Asset servicers that can aggregate, quality-check and warehouse private-asset data — not just the data they produce themselves — will be positioned to deliver higher-value oversight, analytics, and reporting services.
The opportunity is clear: the winners will be the providers that solve the data challenge behind private-market scale.
Clément Miglietti, Chief Product Officer and Chief Technology Officer, NeoXam
The most striking shift has been the real, practical use of AI across private markets. After a decade of talk and tentative pilots, 2025 has been the year firms finally put it to work. A revival in dealmaking and a broader wave of investor activity created the perfect test case, and AI delivered. For a part of the industry known for limited visibility and sluggish reporting, it marked the first time technology genuinely started to close the gap.
The sheer volume and variety of data now flowing through private markets makes manual processing impossible. More documents, more valuation inputs, more noise, and more mismatches in timing have pushed firms toward machine-learning tools that can sift, structure, and reconcile information at scale. AI is becoming the backbone for portfolio-wide data standards, joined-up analytics, and reliable insight that spans both public and private assets.
The momentum is only going one way. With private markets on track to generate more than half of global asset management revenues, firms that hesitate risk being overwhelmed by the data. The next phase will focus on deeper automation, sharper forecasting, and a level of transparency once considered out of reach.
Helen Adair, Chief Product Officer, Taskize
2026 puts legacy post-trade workflows under real strain for UK investment managers
European market infrastructure is heading into a demanding year as the shift to T+1 becomes real rather than theoretical. The regulator has made its expectations clear that firms will be held to account. The larger banks and custodians have already moved into execution mode, applying lessons from the US transition back in 2024. However, the real pressure point sits with smaller asset managers and alternative funds that have long relied on comfortable timelines and manual processes. Two-day settlement allowed for email chains, spreadsheets and people-led workarounds. One day does not.
The challenge is structural rather than cosmetic. The interaction between investment managers and their service providers is where most breaks occur, and this interaction still depends heavily on outdated tools. Lean teams simply cannot absorb higher volumes or faster turnaround times without improved workflows. Yet the solution does not require a wholesale rebuild of operating models. Practical, targeted upgrades can make a significant difference.
Collaboration platforms, self-service tools and API-driven data access can replace slow manual exchanges and give firms a more resilient footing. If smaller managers prioritise these changes in 2026, they will find implementing FCA guidance far easier, and they will be better positioned to meet the demands of T+1 with confidence.
Cybersecurity
Dr Ruth Wandhofer, Head of European Markets at Blackwired
Future significant threats in cybersecurity include increased AI-driven attack sophistication, an expanding digital attack surface, workforce and IT fragmentation, abuse of trusted infrastructure such as cloud platforms, onchain cybercrime, and quantum-turbocharged attacks. Third-party and supply chain cybersecurity risks remain among the most critical challenges. A vulnerability that is largely overlooked but will rise in importance in 2026 is shadow AI, the uncontrolled use of open source and commercial large language models, where employees feed these models with confidential corporate information to simplify their workload.
Emerging technologies such as advanced AI, deepfake detection, zero trust frameworks, and quantum-resistant cryptography will offer more robust defence against increasingly sophisticated cyber-attacks in 2026. The shift toward hybrid and cloud-native environments calls for unified, cloud-agnostic security frameworks and real-time monitoring to address visibility gaps and privilege management challenges. Key to success is a paradigm shift from the old ‘detect and respond’ to ‘predict, prevent and defeat’. Autonomous defence systems must integrate advanced AI for real-time threat detection to obtain critical data on threat actors and their campaigns before they decide to strike.
Ben Goldin, Founder and CEO of Plumery
A trend that will continue gaining momentum throughout 2026 is the shift from customer-first to human-first banking, which aims to get even closer to the customer by understanding their human needs, rather than consumer needs. For example, instead of solely advising on which banking products they should buy, a bank can act as a coach to improve a customer’s financial health. Applying hyperpersonalisation in this way, banks can build trust in the digital realm through tailored and empathetic interactions.
While institutions have been exploring what is possible, relevant and achievable within the banking context using generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), 2026 will see more practical actions and initiatives, such as conversational applications in the front and back office. Using the technology to improve efficiency and help staff do more value-add work will have a positive impact on customer experience, as processes will take much less time. It will also help drive financial inclusion by providing data-driven insights to support faster and smarter decisions, making it cheaper to serve atypical customer segments.
NO FEE, NO RISK
100% ON RETURNS If you invest in only one asset servicing news source this year, make sure it is your free subscription to Asset Servicing Times
100% ON RETURNS If you invest in only one asset servicing news source this year, make sure it is your free subscription to Asset Servicing Times
