Bring to bear: How markets looks to strengthen repo infrastructure
20 January 2026
Industry experts discuss the underlying plumbing required to support the repo market, the broader use and acceptance of digital assets, and regional initiatives leading to an inflection point for institutional repo
Image: stock.adobe.com/Giuseppe Cammino
How do you assess the performance of the repo market over the past 12 months? Can you explore the key trends, drivers, and core lessons learned during this period?
Julien Berge: Over the past year, the European repo market has operated in a broadly stable environment, supported by still-high levels of liquidity and a restrictive European Central Bank (ECB) monetary policy in terms of rates. Repo rates have remained largely aligned with the euro short-term rate (€STR), with limited variations, reflecting their anchoring to the deposit facility rate (DFR) level and the persistent excess liquidity. Observed tensions have been essentially sporadic and technical, linked to episodes of stress on certain core or non-core debt like Italy's, or to quarter-end effects associated with balance sheet constraints.
In the medium term, the main challenge lies in the pace of liquidity reduction by the Eurosystem: as long as it remains sufficient, repo conditions should stay stable; a more pronounced contraction, however, could lead to a more constrained regime, with repo rates moving closer to the refinancing rate and increased differentiation between collateral.
Jordan Cobb: The repo market in 2025 demonstrated resilience and adaptability when assessing performance. Despite a mixed set of macro forces — ranging from the expected, such as shifting Federal Reserve policies, to the unexpected, like tariff-driven inflation concerns — liquidity largely remained robust.
Money market funds (MMFs) consistently allocated record cash to repo, peaking at 44 per cent in the second quarter, according to data from Crane Data, before rebalancing toward outright Treasuries as issuance surged later in the year. Some key trends from 2024 carried momentum into 2025. Fixed Income Clearing Corporation (FICC) sponsored repo volumes reached nearly US$3 trillion, almost 50 per cent above their 2024 highs. Conversely, Fed Reverse Repo balances fell back to early 2021 levels due to overall liquidity tightening.
With increased Treasury issuance supply and accompanying financing demand, repo rates have risen; since 1 September, secured overnight financing rate (SOFR) has exceeded the Fed Funds Target Upper limit 17 times — a sharp contrast to its previous stability below that threshold.
Funding markets thrive on stability and consistency, and the cleared market continues to demonstrate both. The flexibility in adopting clearing access models and operational readiness may not be a new lesson for some, but firms hoping for more clearing mandate delays and underestimating industry-level efforts, risk playing catch-up in 2026.
Anthony Woolley: Over the past 12 months, the repo market has shown remarkable resilience, even as long-standing structural issues continue to surface at stress points. Volatility in funding costs, particularly around quarter and year-end dates, has again highlighted inefficiencies in collateral mobility and uneven market access.
Key trends include the continued concentration of repo activity among a relatively small number of dealers, persistent demand for high-quality liquid assets (HQLA) as collateral, and heightened regulatory scrutiny following previous market stress events. Interest rate volatility through 2024–25 has reinforced the importance of robust, efficient funding mechanisms and the need for infrastructure that can cope with rapid shifts in liquidity conditions.
The core lesson is clear: the repo market's underlying 'plumbing' needs modernisation. Traditional settlement infrastructure creates friction that limits efficiency and restricts access for smaller participants. It also concentrates operational and counterparty risk, particularly in cross-border activity where fragmented systems add unnecessary complexity.
What are the current challenges facing the repo market and is the industry doing enough to combat barriers? How is your firm working to support clients in this environment?
Andrew Lazar: The major challenges are ensuring that the changes related to mandatory cleared repo from an execution, operational, and regulatory standpoint are affected efficiently. In addition, the US Treasury market size is constantly growing, and this trend is likely to remain in place; this suggests that continual improvement regarding intermediation will remain the standard. Working with the industry and regulators to that virtuous end is critical. At Buckler Íø±¬³Ô¹Ï, we will be offering US repo clearing utilising the ACM model to help facilitate client access and market liquidity.
Woolley: Today’s repo market faces several interconnected challenges: settlement risk and delays, collateral immobility, operational complexity, limited access for some categories of participants, and uneven transparency. While these issues are widely acknowledged, most industry responses so far have been incremental rather than transformational, leaving many of the underlying frictions in place.
At Ownera, these pain points are the primary focus of the Intraday Repo SuperApp, which enables the precision exchange and settlement of cash and collateral, eliminating principal risk and materially reducing settlement risk. All of our SuperApps run on software routers managed by market participants, connected to one another using the open peer-to-peer protocol called FinP2P. This privacy-by-design architecture enables institutions to transact bilaterally while maintaining the confidentiality they require, without broadcasting sensitive positions or prices on public ledgers, yet still supporting the auditability and reporting regulators expect.?
Crucially, our infrastructure allows institutions to retain their existing custodial relationships and operational frameworks while gaining access to broader, more efficient repo markets. Rather than asking firms to move assets to new custodians or rebuild workflows, we provide a network layer that connects and orchestrates existing systems, substantially reducing the friction and risk that currently limit market efficiency and market access.
Berge: The main challenges facing the repo market today stem from interest rate volatility, which reduces visibility on funding costs and exacerbates tensions on liquidity and collateral management. Added to this are strengthening regulatory constraints and persistent fragmentation of markets and infrastructures, particularly in Europe, which limits the overall efficiency of the market and complicates access to funding for some players.
The industry has made significant effort to address these issues, notably through process automation, the development of triparty, increased use of clearing, and the gradual evolution of market infrastructures. These initiatives are moving in the right direction, but they remain partial, as a lack of harmonisation and fragmentation continue to hinder their large-scale adoption.
In this environment, our role is to support our clients by offering them robust and tailored operational solutions, enabling them to access liquidity more efficiently and predictably. This involves automating processing chains, optimising collateral management, and utilising triparty and, where relevant, clearing, to reduce operational friction, improve balance sheet efficiency, and strengthen resilience during periods of volatility.
Cobb: Challenges persist around period-end episodic volatility, collateral supply fluctuations, and the operational complexity of regulatory change. The US Íø±¬³Ô¹Ï and Exchange Commission’s (SEC’s) Treasury clearing mandate — even with compliance dates now extended — requires significant legal, operational and technological preparation. While the industry continues to make steady progress, as previously noted in the key trends, harmonising clearing access with trade execution infrastructure and documentation remains a work in progress.
At State Street, we remain committed to advancing adoption of diverse access models and clearing structures that can enable us to service cleared repo markets efficiently.
From a regulatory perspective, which initiatives are impacting the global repo market, and how are these movements shaping your firm’s development strategy and internal systems?
Cobb: Among regulatory initiatives, the SEC’s upcoming Treasury clearing mandate has far-reaching implications for the world’s largest debt market, with indications that it could set a precedent for future jurisdictions to follow.
Basel III Endgame proposals are also significant, especially around leverage ratio and the treatment of sovereigns and repo, which will ultimately shape dealer capacity and repo pricing.
The regulatory and clearing house landscape aligns with our core strategy of servicing our clients in the cleared repo space. Reviewing access models and working with clients has enabled us to enhance our capabilities and improve balance sheet efficiencies, resulting in greater liquidity and access for all clients. Building on this foundation, we have expanded our services to include done-away transactions and entry into the triparty space with our Collateral-in-Lieu offering that differentiates us from traditional triparty collateral servicers. These strategic shifts create new opportunities to deliver greater value for our clients.
To support these advancements, we have implemented robust system upgrades to match the scale of innovation. We remain committed to delivering resilience and efficiency, enabling clients to confidently embrace these new capabilities.
Lazar: The regulatory initiatives currently underway are intended to improve market transparency and resilience. Compliance with these changing initiatives requires significant technology investment that we are committed to implementing. Leverage and liquidity coverage ratio (LCR) changes can help improve balance sheet intermediation and increase the surety of capital preservation.  Â
Berge: Regulation has profoundly transformed the repo market, making it more structured and transparent, sometimes at the cost of some rigidity. The LCR and net stable funding ratio (NSFR) ratios, at the heart of Basel III/IV, limit banks' capacity to play their intermediary role, forcing them to rethink their balance sheet allocation. In parallel, the Íø±¬³Ô¹Ï Financing Transactions Regulation (SFTR) has enhanced transparency and fostered the emergence of centralised platforms, accelerating process automation.
In response to these developments, CACEIS has adapted its strategy by investing in technological solutions to automate regulatory reporting and optimise collateral management. These innovations allow us to meet regulatory requirements while improving our operational efficiency.
Woolley: Several regulatory developments are creating meaningful tailwinds for institutional tokenisation in repo markets. The SEC’s approval of the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation's (DTCC’s) tokenisation service is a watershed for market infrastructure, signalling that tokenisation can be suitable for core post-trade functions within existing regulatory frameworks. At the same time, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s (CFTC’s) pilot programme allowing specified digital assets to be used as margin collateral in regulated derivatives markets, underscores the direction of travel toward broader acceptance of digital assets as collateral.
In Europe, the EU DLT Pilot Regime provides a structured sandbox for trading and settlement of tokenised securities, including repo, while the UK’s Financial Services and Markets Act (FSMA) incorporates measures supportive of digital securities infrastructure. Collectively, these frameworks indicate that regulators see well-designed, permissioned blockchain-based infrastructure as a way to enhance market efficiency, resilience, and transparency, provided it respects institutional compliance requirements.
These developments directly reinforce Ownera’s long-standing design choices. From inception, FinP2P and the Repo SuperApp have been architected for institutional compliance: privacy-by-design for confidentiality, precision settlement aligned with finality and risk-reduction goals, and native integration paths into existing regulatory reporting workflows. This design philosophy has positioned us to support institutions as they move from pilots to production at scale.
What investments and adaptations to technology and working practices have you made during 2025 to advance the use of repo? In particular, what key uses of modern technology are pushing the repo market forward?
Berge: As mentioned previously, we have invested heavily in automation to handle increasing volumes and meet growing regulatory constraints. In this respect, triparty plays a key role by automating collateral management and significantly reducing operational friction.
In a repo market that is still very fragmented, these developments have become essential to absorb growing complexity. The gradual development of cleared repo follows this same logic, contributing to the standardisation of practices, reduction of counterparty risk, and more efficient use of the balance sheet.
In this context, our investments in 2025 have primarily focused on automating processing chains to gain operational efficiency and support market growth.
In parallel, CACEIS has participated in a tokenisation initiative on the operational side, enabling access to a money market fund via both traditional channels and in the form of tokenised units on the public Ethereum blockchain. This initiative improves the traceability and transparency of transactions and opens up prospects for collateral mobility in repo operations.
Ultimately, these developments — automation, triparty, clearing, and targeted distributed ledger technology (DLT) initiatives – could foster more continuous modes of operation and pave the way for the gradual integration of new settlement means, such as stablecoins or central bank digital currencies, thereby contributing to the sustainable modernisation of the repo market.
Cobb: Throughout 2025 and into this year, we have made substantial investments in technology and process innovation. Initially, we enhanced our cleared repo platform to support new indirect access models. Following extensive modernisation of our back-end infrastructure, we are now leveraging real-time risk management. As we work to strengthen our analytics and dashboarding tools to enable scalable, risk conscious growth, we will share these insights with our clients – empowering informed decision-making and greater transparency.
Key technologies driving this transformation include API-based integration for trade capture and settlement, real-time collateral optimisation, and advanced data analytics for liquidity and risk management. These innovations not only strengthen efficiency, transparency, and resilience across the repo market but also form the foundation for continued product evolution, particularly as we expand into new ventures like our triparty collateral management services.
Woolley: In the first half of 2025 we launched our intraday repo solution into production with J.P. Morgan and HQLAX. This was two years in the making, solving the technological, legal, and regulatory challenges required for banks to safely and securely settle large repo transactions intraday. It transacted over US$5 billion notional in the first month and yet was just the first phase of scaling the platform across the market.
The business benefits of precision intraday repo settlement cannot be underestimated — it converts end-of-day funding into real-time liquidity — sourced exactly when required rather than in anticipation. It can reduce large liquidity buffers that sit idle under LCR/NSFR constraints; unlock trapped liquidity; shorten exposure windows and return cash to manage margin spikes and unexpected short-term mismatches.
We are now actively involved with multiple projects expected to go live in 2026 that extend these intraday settlement capabilities to major trading platforms connected to different sources of collateral and forms of digital cash.
In late 2025, we soft-launched the Ownera SuperApps Platform, a major evolution in how institutions can access and deploy tokenisation capabilities for repo and broader securities financing use cases. Instead of building bespoke blockchain applications, firms can now consume ready-to-deploy applications that plug into their existing systems while leveraging the FinP2P network’s connectivity and liquidity.
Several modern technologies are now pushing repo forward in practical ways:
• Precision settlement, which removes principal risk and sharply reduces settlement and counterparty exposure.
• Privacy-preserving, permissioned architectures that reconcile confidentiality with regulatory auditability.
• Interoperability frameworks that link diverse custody, settlement, and collateral-management systems without wholesale replacement of infrastructure.
• Smart-contract-driven automation of collateral management, margining, and lifecycle events, reducing manual workloads and operational error.?
We have also invested heavily in developer tooling and institutional onboarding so that these capabilities integrate smoothly into existing workflows, risk systems, and governance processes.
Lazar: Our client partners have come to expect best in class service provision. To that end, we are constantly and prospectively working with our technology partners to improve our overall client experience. Central clearing is of course the dominant change and requires its due attention. Partnering with other intermediation platforms and new service providers to deliver more efficiently is always top of mind. We are engaged with several to evolve our service provision.
Regions such as the UK, Australia, US, and Mexico are taking steps to improve repo markets. How are you positioning yourself to capture new opportunities for growth, and which markets are you focused on?
Cobb: We see strong growth opportunities as global repo markets modernise — both for our bank balance sheet funding management as well as repo intermediation. In the US, we are deepening our leadership in centrally-cleared repo and supporting clients through the transition to the SEC mandate. In Europe, we are investing in infrastructure and partnerships to support the expansion of cleared repo access, using our US experience to help clients effectively navigate the global regulatory landscape.
Outside of cleared repo, we take a thoughtful and innovative approach to servicing markets. We continue to enhance our peer-to-peer guaranteed repo offering through our expansion into the UK and European markets, aiming to deliver increased pricing efficiency for our clients. In the UK, growing interest in agented trade execution services has enabled us to use our repo expertise to facilitate agency-based access to repo markets.
Woolley: Regional initiatives underway in markets such as the UK, Australia, the US, and Mexico represent a significant inflection point for institutional repo. In the UK, efforts to reinforce London’s role as a global financial centre include a strong focus on digitising and modernising market infrastructure, while Australia has been particularly forward-leaning in exploring tokenisation for securities financing, including securities lending and repo.
The US continues to dominate global repo volumes but faces well-documented efficiency and transparency challenges, and jurisdictions such as Mexico are deepening their capital markets and considering new approaches to market infrastructure that could open additional opportunities. Our strategy is to prioritise jurisdictions where regulatory clarity on digital assets intersects with strong institutional appetite for operational improvement, often in partnership with Tier 1 financial institutions investing in tokenisation.
Rather than pursuing a geography-first expansion model, we follow the global footprints of our institutional clients: once a major bank implements the Repo SuperApp, those capabilities can be extended across its worldwide operations, subject to local regulatory requirements. This network-effect dynamic is central to our growth model — each additional participant enhances the utility and liquidity potential for all existing participants on the network. Production deployments with institutions such as J.P. Morgan, HQLAX, and Goldman Sachs demonstrate this network dynamic in action, as early adopters create pathways for broader institutional participation.
Berge: We are primarily leveraging our role as a custodian and our international footprint, particularly in Mexico, where CACEIS is already well integrated into the local ecosystem. This presence naturally positions us to support the development of the repo market, notably from the custody and post-trade services angle.
Beyond our infrastructure role, we also have the capacity to act as a liquidity provider, which allows us to support our clients more holistically, both in their market operations and in their operational and post-trade needs.
The timing is now favourable: the regulatory framework is evolving, and the regulators, in conjunction with the central bank, are encouraging broader adoption of repo operations. In this context, the gradual broadening of participants — banks, asset managers, and international investors — opens up growth opportunities that we seek to support with robust and tailored solutions for both domestic players and international investors.
How do you assess the outlook for the repo market for 2026?
Cobb: Each year brings its own set of uncertainties, and 2025 has taught us all to expect the unexpected. But with the current unavoidable drivers of liquidity tightening and US debt financing, we could be looking at a year that will mirror the last quarter of 2025. MMF balances remain at record levels, providing relief from pressures on the other side of the funding rate equation. However, the key question is for how long this offset will last and to what extent — that will determine what the next 12 months will look like.
Beyond the macro trends, the industry is marching toward the first of the SEC US Treasury Clearing Mandate compliance dates for the cash trades by 2026 year-end. This mandate demands significant efforts from firms as they move into the execution phase of their clearing readiness plans. At the same time, market infrastructure providers and clearing members should also showcase innovations that will help set the stage for a large volume of uncleared repo still needing to find its way to the cleared market in less than 18 months.
Lazar: We are excited about the opportunities that 2026 will bring. It is a critical year for evolution of the repo market structure, capital and balance sheet utilisation, and liquidity, to efficiently intermediate the constantly growing US Treasury market and meet the dynamic needs of our valued client partners.
Berge: The outlook for the repo market in 2026 should broadly follow the continuity of 2025. As long as excess liquidity remains abundant, market conditions should remain relatively stable, with limited pressure on funding levels. A more marked shift would require a significant decline in this liquidity, combined with an increase in collateral supply, which would mechanically lead to higher funding costs and broader asset repricing. At this stage, these dynamics seem more likely on the horizon of 2027 than in 2026. That said, sovereign debt dynamics could begin to play a more important role.
Even as financing needs increase, demand for European debt could wane, notably for French debt.
This phenomenon would be explained in part by the repositioning of foreign investors, particularly Japanese investors, towards their domestic markets, which have become more attractive again. Furthermore, regulatory constraints affecting certain institutional investors, such as Dutch pension funds — historically large holders of European sovereign debt — could also weigh on demand, limit the market's absorption capacity, and push funding levels towards those of the refinancing rate.
Woolley: Looking ahead to 2026, the outlook for repo is cautiously optimistic: the fundamental need for short-term funding and collateral transformation should continue to support growth in volumes, while the regulatory and technological foundations now in place create conditions for tokenised repo to move from pilot projects to production scale.
In our view, 2026 will be a pivotal year in determining the execution velocity of this transition. The technology to address many of the repo market’s structural challenges already exists; the key question is whether institutions will move quickly enough to implement these solutions before the next significant bout of market stress exposes the fragility of legacy infrastructure — a challenge Ownera is determined to help the industry meet. With Tier 1 institutions now in production and regulatory frameworks increasingly supportive, the infrastructure for a more efficient, accessible repo market is no longer theoretical — it is operational and scaling.
Julien Berge: Over the past year, the European repo market has operated in a broadly stable environment, supported by still-high levels of liquidity and a restrictive European Central Bank (ECB) monetary policy in terms of rates. Repo rates have remained largely aligned with the euro short-term rate (€STR), with limited variations, reflecting their anchoring to the deposit facility rate (DFR) level and the persistent excess liquidity. Observed tensions have been essentially sporadic and technical, linked to episodes of stress on certain core or non-core debt like Italy's, or to quarter-end effects associated with balance sheet constraints.
In the medium term, the main challenge lies in the pace of liquidity reduction by the Eurosystem: as long as it remains sufficient, repo conditions should stay stable; a more pronounced contraction, however, could lead to a more constrained regime, with repo rates moving closer to the refinancing rate and increased differentiation between collateral.
Jordan Cobb: The repo market in 2025 demonstrated resilience and adaptability when assessing performance. Despite a mixed set of macro forces — ranging from the expected, such as shifting Federal Reserve policies, to the unexpected, like tariff-driven inflation concerns — liquidity largely remained robust.
Money market funds (MMFs) consistently allocated record cash to repo, peaking at 44 per cent in the second quarter, according to data from Crane Data, before rebalancing toward outright Treasuries as issuance surged later in the year. Some key trends from 2024 carried momentum into 2025. Fixed Income Clearing Corporation (FICC) sponsored repo volumes reached nearly US$3 trillion, almost 50 per cent above their 2024 highs. Conversely, Fed Reverse Repo balances fell back to early 2021 levels due to overall liquidity tightening.
With increased Treasury issuance supply and accompanying financing demand, repo rates have risen; since 1 September, secured overnight financing rate (SOFR) has exceeded the Fed Funds Target Upper limit 17 times — a sharp contrast to its previous stability below that threshold.
Funding markets thrive on stability and consistency, and the cleared market continues to demonstrate both. The flexibility in adopting clearing access models and operational readiness may not be a new lesson for some, but firms hoping for more clearing mandate delays and underestimating industry-level efforts, risk playing catch-up in 2026.
Anthony Woolley: Over the past 12 months, the repo market has shown remarkable resilience, even as long-standing structural issues continue to surface at stress points. Volatility in funding costs, particularly around quarter and year-end dates, has again highlighted inefficiencies in collateral mobility and uneven market access.
Key trends include the continued concentration of repo activity among a relatively small number of dealers, persistent demand for high-quality liquid assets (HQLA) as collateral, and heightened regulatory scrutiny following previous market stress events. Interest rate volatility through 2024–25 has reinforced the importance of robust, efficient funding mechanisms and the need for infrastructure that can cope with rapid shifts in liquidity conditions.
The core lesson is clear: the repo market's underlying 'plumbing' needs modernisation. Traditional settlement infrastructure creates friction that limits efficiency and restricts access for smaller participants. It also concentrates operational and counterparty risk, particularly in cross-border activity where fragmented systems add unnecessary complexity.
What are the current challenges facing the repo market and is the industry doing enough to combat barriers? How is your firm working to support clients in this environment?
Andrew Lazar: The major challenges are ensuring that the changes related to mandatory cleared repo from an execution, operational, and regulatory standpoint are affected efficiently. In addition, the US Treasury market size is constantly growing, and this trend is likely to remain in place; this suggests that continual improvement regarding intermediation will remain the standard. Working with the industry and regulators to that virtuous end is critical. At Buckler Íø±¬³Ô¹Ï, we will be offering US repo clearing utilising the ACM model to help facilitate client access and market liquidity.
Woolley: Today’s repo market faces several interconnected challenges: settlement risk and delays, collateral immobility, operational complexity, limited access for some categories of participants, and uneven transparency. While these issues are widely acknowledged, most industry responses so far have been incremental rather than transformational, leaving many of the underlying frictions in place.
At Ownera, these pain points are the primary focus of the Intraday Repo SuperApp, which enables the precision exchange and settlement of cash and collateral, eliminating principal risk and materially reducing settlement risk. All of our SuperApps run on software routers managed by market participants, connected to one another using the open peer-to-peer protocol called FinP2P. This privacy-by-design architecture enables institutions to transact bilaterally while maintaining the confidentiality they require, without broadcasting sensitive positions or prices on public ledgers, yet still supporting the auditability and reporting regulators expect.?
Crucially, our infrastructure allows institutions to retain their existing custodial relationships and operational frameworks while gaining access to broader, more efficient repo markets. Rather than asking firms to move assets to new custodians or rebuild workflows, we provide a network layer that connects and orchestrates existing systems, substantially reducing the friction and risk that currently limit market efficiency and market access.
Berge: The main challenges facing the repo market today stem from interest rate volatility, which reduces visibility on funding costs and exacerbates tensions on liquidity and collateral management. Added to this are strengthening regulatory constraints and persistent fragmentation of markets and infrastructures, particularly in Europe, which limits the overall efficiency of the market and complicates access to funding for some players.
The industry has made significant effort to address these issues, notably through process automation, the development of triparty, increased use of clearing, and the gradual evolution of market infrastructures. These initiatives are moving in the right direction, but they remain partial, as a lack of harmonisation and fragmentation continue to hinder their large-scale adoption.
In this environment, our role is to support our clients by offering them robust and tailored operational solutions, enabling them to access liquidity more efficiently and predictably. This involves automating processing chains, optimising collateral management, and utilising triparty and, where relevant, clearing, to reduce operational friction, improve balance sheet efficiency, and strengthen resilience during periods of volatility.
Cobb: Challenges persist around period-end episodic volatility, collateral supply fluctuations, and the operational complexity of regulatory change. The US Íø±¬³Ô¹Ï and Exchange Commission’s (SEC’s) Treasury clearing mandate — even with compliance dates now extended — requires significant legal, operational and technological preparation. While the industry continues to make steady progress, as previously noted in the key trends, harmonising clearing access with trade execution infrastructure and documentation remains a work in progress.
At State Street, we remain committed to advancing adoption of diverse access models and clearing structures that can enable us to service cleared repo markets efficiently.
From a regulatory perspective, which initiatives are impacting the global repo market, and how are these movements shaping your firm’s development strategy and internal systems?
Cobb: Among regulatory initiatives, the SEC’s upcoming Treasury clearing mandate has far-reaching implications for the world’s largest debt market, with indications that it could set a precedent for future jurisdictions to follow.
Basel III Endgame proposals are also significant, especially around leverage ratio and the treatment of sovereigns and repo, which will ultimately shape dealer capacity and repo pricing.
The regulatory and clearing house landscape aligns with our core strategy of servicing our clients in the cleared repo space. Reviewing access models and working with clients has enabled us to enhance our capabilities and improve balance sheet efficiencies, resulting in greater liquidity and access for all clients. Building on this foundation, we have expanded our services to include done-away transactions and entry into the triparty space with our Collateral-in-Lieu offering that differentiates us from traditional triparty collateral servicers. These strategic shifts create new opportunities to deliver greater value for our clients.
To support these advancements, we have implemented robust system upgrades to match the scale of innovation. We remain committed to delivering resilience and efficiency, enabling clients to confidently embrace these new capabilities.
Lazar: The regulatory initiatives currently underway are intended to improve market transparency and resilience. Compliance with these changing initiatives requires significant technology investment that we are committed to implementing. Leverage and liquidity coverage ratio (LCR) changes can help improve balance sheet intermediation and increase the surety of capital preservation.  Â
Berge: Regulation has profoundly transformed the repo market, making it more structured and transparent, sometimes at the cost of some rigidity. The LCR and net stable funding ratio (NSFR) ratios, at the heart of Basel III/IV, limit banks' capacity to play their intermediary role, forcing them to rethink their balance sheet allocation. In parallel, the Íø±¬³Ô¹Ï Financing Transactions Regulation (SFTR) has enhanced transparency and fostered the emergence of centralised platforms, accelerating process automation.
In response to these developments, CACEIS has adapted its strategy by investing in technological solutions to automate regulatory reporting and optimise collateral management. These innovations allow us to meet regulatory requirements while improving our operational efficiency.
Woolley: Several regulatory developments are creating meaningful tailwinds for institutional tokenisation in repo markets. The SEC’s approval of the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation's (DTCC’s) tokenisation service is a watershed for market infrastructure, signalling that tokenisation can be suitable for core post-trade functions within existing regulatory frameworks. At the same time, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s (CFTC’s) pilot programme allowing specified digital assets to be used as margin collateral in regulated derivatives markets, underscores the direction of travel toward broader acceptance of digital assets as collateral.
In Europe, the EU DLT Pilot Regime provides a structured sandbox for trading and settlement of tokenised securities, including repo, while the UK’s Financial Services and Markets Act (FSMA) incorporates measures supportive of digital securities infrastructure. Collectively, these frameworks indicate that regulators see well-designed, permissioned blockchain-based infrastructure as a way to enhance market efficiency, resilience, and transparency, provided it respects institutional compliance requirements.
These developments directly reinforce Ownera’s long-standing design choices. From inception, FinP2P and the Repo SuperApp have been architected for institutional compliance: privacy-by-design for confidentiality, precision settlement aligned with finality and risk-reduction goals, and native integration paths into existing regulatory reporting workflows. This design philosophy has positioned us to support institutions as they move from pilots to production at scale.
What investments and adaptations to technology and working practices have you made during 2025 to advance the use of repo? In particular, what key uses of modern technology are pushing the repo market forward?
Berge: As mentioned previously, we have invested heavily in automation to handle increasing volumes and meet growing regulatory constraints. In this respect, triparty plays a key role by automating collateral management and significantly reducing operational friction.
In a repo market that is still very fragmented, these developments have become essential to absorb growing complexity. The gradual development of cleared repo follows this same logic, contributing to the standardisation of practices, reduction of counterparty risk, and more efficient use of the balance sheet.
In this context, our investments in 2025 have primarily focused on automating processing chains to gain operational efficiency and support market growth.
In parallel, CACEIS has participated in a tokenisation initiative on the operational side, enabling access to a money market fund via both traditional channels and in the form of tokenised units on the public Ethereum blockchain. This initiative improves the traceability and transparency of transactions and opens up prospects for collateral mobility in repo operations.
Ultimately, these developments — automation, triparty, clearing, and targeted distributed ledger technology (DLT) initiatives – could foster more continuous modes of operation and pave the way for the gradual integration of new settlement means, such as stablecoins or central bank digital currencies, thereby contributing to the sustainable modernisation of the repo market.
Cobb: Throughout 2025 and into this year, we have made substantial investments in technology and process innovation. Initially, we enhanced our cleared repo platform to support new indirect access models. Following extensive modernisation of our back-end infrastructure, we are now leveraging real-time risk management. As we work to strengthen our analytics and dashboarding tools to enable scalable, risk conscious growth, we will share these insights with our clients – empowering informed decision-making and greater transparency.
Key technologies driving this transformation include API-based integration for trade capture and settlement, real-time collateral optimisation, and advanced data analytics for liquidity and risk management. These innovations not only strengthen efficiency, transparency, and resilience across the repo market but also form the foundation for continued product evolution, particularly as we expand into new ventures like our triparty collateral management services.
Woolley: In the first half of 2025 we launched our intraday repo solution into production with J.P. Morgan and HQLAX. This was two years in the making, solving the technological, legal, and regulatory challenges required for banks to safely and securely settle large repo transactions intraday. It transacted over US$5 billion notional in the first month and yet was just the first phase of scaling the platform across the market.
The business benefits of precision intraday repo settlement cannot be underestimated — it converts end-of-day funding into real-time liquidity — sourced exactly when required rather than in anticipation. It can reduce large liquidity buffers that sit idle under LCR/NSFR constraints; unlock trapped liquidity; shorten exposure windows and return cash to manage margin spikes and unexpected short-term mismatches.
We are now actively involved with multiple projects expected to go live in 2026 that extend these intraday settlement capabilities to major trading platforms connected to different sources of collateral and forms of digital cash.
In late 2025, we soft-launched the Ownera SuperApps Platform, a major evolution in how institutions can access and deploy tokenisation capabilities for repo and broader securities financing use cases. Instead of building bespoke blockchain applications, firms can now consume ready-to-deploy applications that plug into their existing systems while leveraging the FinP2P network’s connectivity and liquidity.
Several modern technologies are now pushing repo forward in practical ways:
• Precision settlement, which removes principal risk and sharply reduces settlement and counterparty exposure.
• Privacy-preserving, permissioned architectures that reconcile confidentiality with regulatory auditability.
• Interoperability frameworks that link diverse custody, settlement, and collateral-management systems without wholesale replacement of infrastructure.
• Smart-contract-driven automation of collateral management, margining, and lifecycle events, reducing manual workloads and operational error.?
We have also invested heavily in developer tooling and institutional onboarding so that these capabilities integrate smoothly into existing workflows, risk systems, and governance processes.
Lazar: Our client partners have come to expect best in class service provision. To that end, we are constantly and prospectively working with our technology partners to improve our overall client experience. Central clearing is of course the dominant change and requires its due attention. Partnering with other intermediation platforms and new service providers to deliver more efficiently is always top of mind. We are engaged with several to evolve our service provision.
Regions such as the UK, Australia, US, and Mexico are taking steps to improve repo markets. How are you positioning yourself to capture new opportunities for growth, and which markets are you focused on?
Cobb: We see strong growth opportunities as global repo markets modernise — both for our bank balance sheet funding management as well as repo intermediation. In the US, we are deepening our leadership in centrally-cleared repo and supporting clients through the transition to the SEC mandate. In Europe, we are investing in infrastructure and partnerships to support the expansion of cleared repo access, using our US experience to help clients effectively navigate the global regulatory landscape.
Outside of cleared repo, we take a thoughtful and innovative approach to servicing markets. We continue to enhance our peer-to-peer guaranteed repo offering through our expansion into the UK and European markets, aiming to deliver increased pricing efficiency for our clients. In the UK, growing interest in agented trade execution services has enabled us to use our repo expertise to facilitate agency-based access to repo markets.
Woolley: Regional initiatives underway in markets such as the UK, Australia, the US, and Mexico represent a significant inflection point for institutional repo. In the UK, efforts to reinforce London’s role as a global financial centre include a strong focus on digitising and modernising market infrastructure, while Australia has been particularly forward-leaning in exploring tokenisation for securities financing, including securities lending and repo.
The US continues to dominate global repo volumes but faces well-documented efficiency and transparency challenges, and jurisdictions such as Mexico are deepening their capital markets and considering new approaches to market infrastructure that could open additional opportunities. Our strategy is to prioritise jurisdictions where regulatory clarity on digital assets intersects with strong institutional appetite for operational improvement, often in partnership with Tier 1 financial institutions investing in tokenisation.
Rather than pursuing a geography-first expansion model, we follow the global footprints of our institutional clients: once a major bank implements the Repo SuperApp, those capabilities can be extended across its worldwide operations, subject to local regulatory requirements. This network-effect dynamic is central to our growth model — each additional participant enhances the utility and liquidity potential for all existing participants on the network. Production deployments with institutions such as J.P. Morgan, HQLAX, and Goldman Sachs demonstrate this network dynamic in action, as early adopters create pathways for broader institutional participation.
Berge: We are primarily leveraging our role as a custodian and our international footprint, particularly in Mexico, where CACEIS is already well integrated into the local ecosystem. This presence naturally positions us to support the development of the repo market, notably from the custody and post-trade services angle.
Beyond our infrastructure role, we also have the capacity to act as a liquidity provider, which allows us to support our clients more holistically, both in their market operations and in their operational and post-trade needs.
The timing is now favourable: the regulatory framework is evolving, and the regulators, in conjunction with the central bank, are encouraging broader adoption of repo operations. In this context, the gradual broadening of participants — banks, asset managers, and international investors — opens up growth opportunities that we seek to support with robust and tailored solutions for both domestic players and international investors.
How do you assess the outlook for the repo market for 2026?
Cobb: Each year brings its own set of uncertainties, and 2025 has taught us all to expect the unexpected. But with the current unavoidable drivers of liquidity tightening and US debt financing, we could be looking at a year that will mirror the last quarter of 2025. MMF balances remain at record levels, providing relief from pressures on the other side of the funding rate equation. However, the key question is for how long this offset will last and to what extent — that will determine what the next 12 months will look like.
Beyond the macro trends, the industry is marching toward the first of the SEC US Treasury Clearing Mandate compliance dates for the cash trades by 2026 year-end. This mandate demands significant efforts from firms as they move into the execution phase of their clearing readiness plans. At the same time, market infrastructure providers and clearing members should also showcase innovations that will help set the stage for a large volume of uncleared repo still needing to find its way to the cleared market in less than 18 months.
Lazar: We are excited about the opportunities that 2026 will bring. It is a critical year for evolution of the repo market structure, capital and balance sheet utilisation, and liquidity, to efficiently intermediate the constantly growing US Treasury market and meet the dynamic needs of our valued client partners.
Berge: The outlook for the repo market in 2026 should broadly follow the continuity of 2025. As long as excess liquidity remains abundant, market conditions should remain relatively stable, with limited pressure on funding levels. A more marked shift would require a significant decline in this liquidity, combined with an increase in collateral supply, which would mechanically lead to higher funding costs and broader asset repricing. At this stage, these dynamics seem more likely on the horizon of 2027 than in 2026. That said, sovereign debt dynamics could begin to play a more important role.
Even as financing needs increase, demand for European debt could wane, notably for French debt.
This phenomenon would be explained in part by the repositioning of foreign investors, particularly Japanese investors, towards their domestic markets, which have become more attractive again. Furthermore, regulatory constraints affecting certain institutional investors, such as Dutch pension funds — historically large holders of European sovereign debt — could also weigh on demand, limit the market's absorption capacity, and push funding levels towards those of the refinancing rate.
Woolley: Looking ahead to 2026, the outlook for repo is cautiously optimistic: the fundamental need for short-term funding and collateral transformation should continue to support growth in volumes, while the regulatory and technological foundations now in place create conditions for tokenised repo to move from pilot projects to production scale.
In our view, 2026 will be a pivotal year in determining the execution velocity of this transition. The technology to address many of the repo market’s structural challenges already exists; the key question is whether institutions will move quickly enough to implement these solutions before the next significant bout of market stress exposes the fragility of legacy infrastructure — a challenge Ownera is determined to help the industry meet. With Tier 1 institutions now in production and regulatory frameworks increasingly supportive, the infrastructure for a more efficient, accessible repo market is no longer theoretical — it is operational and scaling.
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