From fragmented to connected: Building the foundations for a more effective securities finance market
29 September 2026
The industry does not need uniformity in commercial decision making. It does need common, scalable foundations that enable participants to act with greater certainty across an increasingly complex market, says Amanda Sayers, senior director, product management at Broadridge
Image: Shutterstock
The debate about market structure is often framed too simply. On one side sits the bilateral model: relationship-led, differentiated, and adaptable to the specific requirements of lenders, borrowers, agents, dealers, and asset owners. On the other sits the prospect of greater centralisation: common infrastructure, more standardised processes, and improved visibility across activity.
That framing obscures the more important question. The issue is not whether the market should choose between bilateral engagement and shared infrastructure. It is whether the foundations beneath commercial activity are sufficiently connected for firms to make informed decisions, deploy balance sheet efficiently, and manage the full consequences of those decisions with confidence.
For senior market participants, this is not principally a technology discussion. It is a question of market effectiveness. As financing needs, collateral requirements, regulatory expectations, and client demands continue to evolve, the quality of the connections between data, workflow, risk, and operations increasingly determines whether firms can convert an opportunity into a reliably serviced transaction.
The securities finance market has long demonstrated its ability to adapt. Its diversity is a strength: participants bring different inventory profiles, risk appetites, liquidity needs, investment horizons, and service models. That diversity supports choice and creates the conditions for a deep, resilient market. It should not be treated as a problem to be designed away.
But diversity becomes friction when the information and operational processes required to support a transaction do not travel with it. Firms may have strong internal capabilities, yet still encounter delays in establishing what is available, executable, eligible, settled, or at risk. The resulting cost is not confined to operations. It affects the speed of decision making, the confidence with which capital is committed and the capacity available to serve clients.
From market choice to operational certainty
Commercial differentiation should remain exactly that: commercial. Pricing, counterparty selection, credit judgement, inventory strategy, and client relationships are core sources of competitive advantage. They should reflect the individual objectives and constraints of each participant, rather than being forced into a universal model.
However, the processes that enable those decisions need not be equally fragmented. There is a meaningful distinction between preserving differentiated market participation and accepting disconnected data, duplicated workflow, and limited lifecycle visibility as inevitable features of the market.
A firm should be able to determine its own appetite for a transaction without having to reconcile multiple versions of the same information. It should be able to manage a relationship in the manner that best serves its client without creating unnecessary manual work for operations. It should be able to access the liquidity and service models relevant to its strategy without being constrained by closed systems or costly point-to-point integration.
This is where common foundations have value. Consistent data, interoperable workflow, clear controls, and reliable status visibility do not remove commercial choice. They make that choice more actionable. They allow participants to assess opportunities in their proper context, understand the downstream implications of a decision, and respond more effectively when market conditions change.
In this sense, connectivity should not be judged by the number of systems linked together, nor by whether the market converges on a single venue or utility. Its value lies in whether it reduces decision latency, improves execution certainty, and allows firms to manage risk and service activity more effectively across the lifecycle.
Data needs context, not simply greater volume
The market does not lack data. It lacks, in many cases, the ability to bring relevant information together at the moment and in the workflow where it is needed. Rates, availability, collateral eligibility, settlement status, exposure, recalls, and client commitments all contribute to the quality of a decision. Viewed independently, none provides a complete picture.
For example, an apparently attractive opportunity may be less compelling when settlement conditions, collateral implications, or expected lifecycle events are considered. Conversely, a position that appears operationally complex may be manageable when the right data, controls, and servicing capacity are visible early enough. The objective is not to expose commercially sensitive intent indiscriminately or to make every market signal universally available. It is to ensure that authorised participants can work from timely, governed, and sufficiently contextual information.
That requires more than better dashboards. It requires a disciplined approach to data lineage, entitlements, identifiers, and quality. It also requires firms to consider how information moves between front office, operations, collateral, risk, and client-service functions. Where data is captured once but reinterpreted repeatedly across separate processes, ambiguity, and exception risk increase. Where it can move reliably through the lifecycle, firms can make decisions with greater confidence and less operational overhead.
For senior leaders, the strategic point is clear: data quality is not only a control issue. It is an operating model issue. It determines how quickly a firm can move from market intelligence to a decision, from a decision to execution, and from execution to a service outcome that meets both internal standards and client expectations.
The lifecycle is where market structure becomes real
Much market structure debate understandably centres on pre-trade activity and execution. Yet a transaction’s value is not established at the point of agreement. It is realised only when confirmation, settlement, collateral management, corporate actions, recalls, returns, reporting, and exception management all operate with sufficient certainty.
This is why the lifecycle should be treated as the unit of change. A market can improve the speed of initial execution while still carrying substantial friction if downstream processes remain disconnected. Equally, stronger post-trade visibility can improve the quality of upstream decisions by giving trading and financing teams a clearer view of operational constraints, settlement performance, and servicing capacity.
The most effective operating models therefore create continuity between commercial intent and operational reality. They ensure that the terms, conditions, and dependencies understood at the outset remain visible to the functions responsible for servicing the activity. They provide a shared view of material status changes and allow exceptions to be identified, prioritised, and resolved before they become more costly to manage.
This is particularly relevant in an environment where participants are expected to do more with greater control. Firms must manage complex portfolios, respond to intraday developments, maintain robust governance, and deliver a high standard of client service.
The answer is not simply more automation. It is more purposeful automation: technology applied to reduce avoidable hand-offs, direct human expertise towards the exceptions that genuinely require judgement, and provide a clearer control environment across the transaction lifecycle.
Common foundations, open participation
There is a risk that calls for greater connectivity are interpreted as an argument for a closed, centralised market. That would be the wrong conclusion. An effective future model should support open participation across counterparties, venues, and service providers, not impose a single route to market.
Interoperability is central to this distinction. Firms should be able to connect into the broader ecosystem without repeatedly rebuilding interfaces, translating data, or duplicating controls. They should be able to retain the platforms and relationships that support their strategy while benefiting from common capabilities where those capabilities improve resilience, scale, and service quality.
That does not mean that every process must be standardised. Rather, it means identifying the areas where shared foundations create collective value: common data conventions, controlled information exchange, workflow interoperability, clear lifecycle status, and robust exception management. These are enabling capabilities. They can strengthen the market without determining how participants price, transact, or compete.
Common connectivity should not be confused with uniformity, or with an attempt to constrain innovation. Markets do not become more effective when every participant behaves in the same way. They become more effective when every participant can act on reliable information, with clear visibility into the consequences of their decisions.
The future of securities finance will not be defined by uniformity of behaviour, but by the connectivity of the foundations that support it. Such an approach also avoids a familiar trap: solving fragmentation in one part of the ecosystem only to create a new silo elsewhere. The test for any platform or infrastructure initiative should be whether it expands a participant’s ability to operate effectively across the market, while preserving control over its own commercial decisions, data governance, and client relationships.
A more demanding definition of progress
The industry should set a high bar for progress. It is not enough to digitise existing processes or add another channel through which participants can exchange information. The real measure is whether market participants can make better decisions and execute them with fewer avoidable constraints.
Can a firm identify relevant capacity and opportunity with greater confidence? Can it assess the operational and collateral consequences of a decision before rather than after execution? Can it reduce the time and manual effort required to resolve breaks? Can it provide clients with clearer, more timely insight into the activity being managed on their behalf? And can it achieve all of this without compromising the flexibility and relationship dynamics that have long underpinned the market?
These are demanding objectives, but they are more useful than a binary debate about centralisation. They recognise that market structure is not defined solely by venues or execution protocols. It is also defined by the quality of the data, controls, and workflow that allow participants to operate across the ecosystem.
The next stage of development in securities finance should therefore focus on common, scalable foundations rather than uniform market behaviour. The industry does not need every decision to look the same. It needs the infrastructure beneath those decisions to be sufficiently connected, resilient, and transparent to the right participants.
When that foundation is in place, firms can devote more attention to the areas where their expertise matters most: allocating capital, managing risk, building client relationships, and responding to changing market conditions. That is the opportunity in moving from fragmented to connected — not to remove choice, but to make choice more informed, more executable, and more reliable throughout the lifecycle.
That framing obscures the more important question. The issue is not whether the market should choose between bilateral engagement and shared infrastructure. It is whether the foundations beneath commercial activity are sufficiently connected for firms to make informed decisions, deploy balance sheet efficiently, and manage the full consequences of those decisions with confidence.
For senior market participants, this is not principally a technology discussion. It is a question of market effectiveness. As financing needs, collateral requirements, regulatory expectations, and client demands continue to evolve, the quality of the connections between data, workflow, risk, and operations increasingly determines whether firms can convert an opportunity into a reliably serviced transaction.
The securities finance market has long demonstrated its ability to adapt. Its diversity is a strength: participants bring different inventory profiles, risk appetites, liquidity needs, investment horizons, and service models. That diversity supports choice and creates the conditions for a deep, resilient market. It should not be treated as a problem to be designed away.
But diversity becomes friction when the information and operational processes required to support a transaction do not travel with it. Firms may have strong internal capabilities, yet still encounter delays in establishing what is available, executable, eligible, settled, or at risk. The resulting cost is not confined to operations. It affects the speed of decision making, the confidence with which capital is committed and the capacity available to serve clients.
From market choice to operational certainty
Commercial differentiation should remain exactly that: commercial. Pricing, counterparty selection, credit judgement, inventory strategy, and client relationships are core sources of competitive advantage. They should reflect the individual objectives and constraints of each participant, rather than being forced into a universal model.
However, the processes that enable those decisions need not be equally fragmented. There is a meaningful distinction between preserving differentiated market participation and accepting disconnected data, duplicated workflow, and limited lifecycle visibility as inevitable features of the market.
A firm should be able to determine its own appetite for a transaction without having to reconcile multiple versions of the same information. It should be able to manage a relationship in the manner that best serves its client without creating unnecessary manual work for operations. It should be able to access the liquidity and service models relevant to its strategy without being constrained by closed systems or costly point-to-point integration.
This is where common foundations have value. Consistent data, interoperable workflow, clear controls, and reliable status visibility do not remove commercial choice. They make that choice more actionable. They allow participants to assess opportunities in their proper context, understand the downstream implications of a decision, and respond more effectively when market conditions change.
In this sense, connectivity should not be judged by the number of systems linked together, nor by whether the market converges on a single venue or utility. Its value lies in whether it reduces decision latency, improves execution certainty, and allows firms to manage risk and service activity more effectively across the lifecycle.
Data needs context, not simply greater volume
The market does not lack data. It lacks, in many cases, the ability to bring relevant information together at the moment and in the workflow where it is needed. Rates, availability, collateral eligibility, settlement status, exposure, recalls, and client commitments all contribute to the quality of a decision. Viewed independently, none provides a complete picture.
For example, an apparently attractive opportunity may be less compelling when settlement conditions, collateral implications, or expected lifecycle events are considered. Conversely, a position that appears operationally complex may be manageable when the right data, controls, and servicing capacity are visible early enough. The objective is not to expose commercially sensitive intent indiscriminately or to make every market signal universally available. It is to ensure that authorised participants can work from timely, governed, and sufficiently contextual information.
That requires more than better dashboards. It requires a disciplined approach to data lineage, entitlements, identifiers, and quality. It also requires firms to consider how information moves between front office, operations, collateral, risk, and client-service functions. Where data is captured once but reinterpreted repeatedly across separate processes, ambiguity, and exception risk increase. Where it can move reliably through the lifecycle, firms can make decisions with greater confidence and less operational overhead.
For senior leaders, the strategic point is clear: data quality is not only a control issue. It is an operating model issue. It determines how quickly a firm can move from market intelligence to a decision, from a decision to execution, and from execution to a service outcome that meets both internal standards and client expectations.
The lifecycle is where market structure becomes real
Much market structure debate understandably centres on pre-trade activity and execution. Yet a transaction’s value is not established at the point of agreement. It is realised only when confirmation, settlement, collateral management, corporate actions, recalls, returns, reporting, and exception management all operate with sufficient certainty.
This is why the lifecycle should be treated as the unit of change. A market can improve the speed of initial execution while still carrying substantial friction if downstream processes remain disconnected. Equally, stronger post-trade visibility can improve the quality of upstream decisions by giving trading and financing teams a clearer view of operational constraints, settlement performance, and servicing capacity.
The most effective operating models therefore create continuity between commercial intent and operational reality. They ensure that the terms, conditions, and dependencies understood at the outset remain visible to the functions responsible for servicing the activity. They provide a shared view of material status changes and allow exceptions to be identified, prioritised, and resolved before they become more costly to manage.
This is particularly relevant in an environment where participants are expected to do more with greater control. Firms must manage complex portfolios, respond to intraday developments, maintain robust governance, and deliver a high standard of client service.
The answer is not simply more automation. It is more purposeful automation: technology applied to reduce avoidable hand-offs, direct human expertise towards the exceptions that genuinely require judgement, and provide a clearer control environment across the transaction lifecycle.
Common foundations, open participation
There is a risk that calls for greater connectivity are interpreted as an argument for a closed, centralised market. That would be the wrong conclusion. An effective future model should support open participation across counterparties, venues, and service providers, not impose a single route to market.
Interoperability is central to this distinction. Firms should be able to connect into the broader ecosystem without repeatedly rebuilding interfaces, translating data, or duplicating controls. They should be able to retain the platforms and relationships that support their strategy while benefiting from common capabilities where those capabilities improve resilience, scale, and service quality.
That does not mean that every process must be standardised. Rather, it means identifying the areas where shared foundations create collective value: common data conventions, controlled information exchange, workflow interoperability, clear lifecycle status, and robust exception management. These are enabling capabilities. They can strengthen the market without determining how participants price, transact, or compete.
Common connectivity should not be confused with uniformity, or with an attempt to constrain innovation. Markets do not become more effective when every participant behaves in the same way. They become more effective when every participant can act on reliable information, with clear visibility into the consequences of their decisions.
The future of securities finance will not be defined by uniformity of behaviour, but by the connectivity of the foundations that support it. Such an approach also avoids a familiar trap: solving fragmentation in one part of the ecosystem only to create a new silo elsewhere. The test for any platform or infrastructure initiative should be whether it expands a participant’s ability to operate effectively across the market, while preserving control over its own commercial decisions, data governance, and client relationships.
A more demanding definition of progress
The industry should set a high bar for progress. It is not enough to digitise existing processes or add another channel through which participants can exchange information. The real measure is whether market participants can make better decisions and execute them with fewer avoidable constraints.
Can a firm identify relevant capacity and opportunity with greater confidence? Can it assess the operational and collateral consequences of a decision before rather than after execution? Can it reduce the time and manual effort required to resolve breaks? Can it provide clients with clearer, more timely insight into the activity being managed on their behalf? And can it achieve all of this without compromising the flexibility and relationship dynamics that have long underpinned the market?
These are demanding objectives, but they are more useful than a binary debate about centralisation. They recognise that market structure is not defined solely by venues or execution protocols. It is also defined by the quality of the data, controls, and workflow that allow participants to operate across the ecosystem.
The next stage of development in securities finance should therefore focus on common, scalable foundations rather than uniform market behaviour. The industry does not need every decision to look the same. It needs the infrastructure beneath those decisions to be sufficiently connected, resilient, and transparent to the right participants.
When that foundation is in place, firms can devote more attention to the areas where their expertise matters most: allocating capital, managing risk, building client relationships, and responding to changing market conditions. That is the opportunity in moving from fragmented to connected — not to remove choice, but to make choice more informed, more executable, and more reliable throughout the lifecycle.
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