From friction to flow: Why intraday repo is the next upgrade for securities finance
May 2026
Anthony Woolley, chief client officer of Ownera, discusses the importance of same-day repo transactions to allow firms to respond dynamically to margin calls, funding gaps, collateral optimisation opportunities, and keep up with a rapidly evolving market
Image: Masque
Repo is one of the most important liquidity tools in global financial markets, and it is growing faster than it has in years. Yet the way it operates day-to-day remains structurally out of step with how firms now need to manage cash and collateral — continuously, dynamically, and in real time. The next upgrade in securities finance is not a new product. It is a timing upgrade. Intraday repo is how the market closes that gap, and it does so without inflating regulatory liquidity buffers, leverage exposure, or secured funding costs.
A multi-trillion market hitting new highs
The scale of the opportunity is worth anchoring. In Europe, the International Capital Market Association’s (ICMA’s) 50th semi-annual survey (December 2025) put outstanding repo at a record €13.7 trillion, up 24.6 per cent year-on-year (YoY) — one of the sharpest expansions the survey has recorded. In the United States, the Office of Financial Research’s (OFR’s) new transaction-level data shows the repo market averaged approximately US$12.6 trillion in daily exposures in Q3 2025, roughly US$700 billion higher than prior estimates once non-centrally cleared bilateral repo is properly captured.
These figures are not directly comparable. The ICMA number is a point-in-time outstanding balance drawn from a survey sample; the OFR figure is an average of daily exposures across the full market. But the direction is unambiguous. Repo is growing, cleared activity is growing faster still, and infrastructure venues are following suit — Eurex Repo closed 2025 with average term-adjusted volumes up 20 per cent YoY to €406 billion, a new record.
In a market of this size, even marginal efficiency gains translate into material economic value. That is where intraday repo comes in.
A market that still moves too slowly
Despite its scale and sophistication, repo remains operationally fragmented. A typical transaction requires coordination across trading desks, treasury functions, triparty agents, custodians, central securities depositories (CSDs) such as Euroclear and Clearstream, and payment systems. These processes are largely sequential rather than synchronised, with limited real-time visibility into collateral availability, settlement status, or cash positioning. The result is structural inefficiency: excess liquidity buffers held as a precaution, delayed deployment of collateral, and missed opportunities to optimise funding and balance sheet usage.
Most of today’s repo workflow is still aligned to end-of-day settlement cycles and overnight funding horizons. That made sense in a world where intraday liquidity was a back office problem. It no longer does. Basel intraday liquidity monitoring, cleared margin calls, and the rise of same-day funding events have made intraday the horizon that matters — and the one the operating model has yet to catch up with.
Why intraday repo matters
Intraday repo addresses the fundamental limitation in today’s market: timing. Rather than waiting for overnight cycles to mobilise collateral and cash, intraday repo enables same-day or true intraday settlement, allowing firms to respond dynamically to margin calls, funding gaps, and collateral optimisation opportunities. A treasurer facing a mid-morning margin call no longer needs to pre-fund against it from an oversized liquidity buffer; the position can be funded when it arises and unwound before the day ends.
For banks, dealers, and asset managers, the economic case is both operational and financial. Tighter intraday liquidity management reduces the size of precautionary buffers. More efficient collateral utilisation increases velocity on high-quality assets. Faster response to funding and margin requirements reduces reliance on expensive contingent liquidity lines. Reduced operational friction cuts the cost of running a repo book. Aggregated across a balance sheet measured in hundreds of billions, these are not marginal gains.
Adoption depends on the ecosystem
The primary obstacle to intraday repo at scale is not technical. It is coordination. A repo transaction spans multiple institutions and infrastructures, and intraday settlement demands that all of them move in lockstep: collateral allocated, cash instructed, and both legs finalised within minutes rather than hours. Efficient execution therefore requires real-time alignment across custodians, CSDs, triparty agents, central counterparties (CCPs), and payment systems that were not originally designed to operate on that timeline.
This makes intraday repo a network problem rather than a single-firm solution. No individual bank, custodian, or CCP can unlock it alone. What is needed is an orchestration layer that coordinates collateral allocation, settlement instructions, and cash movements across existing systems, enabling interoperability without forcing anyone to rip and replace their core infrastructure. This is precisely the gap that emerging application-layer protocols are built to close — most notably Ownera’s FinP2P network which connects a community of regulated collateral and liquidity partners to ensure the resulting ecosystem is institution-led and built on trusted participants.
What ‘real-time’ actually means in repo
It is worth being precise about what ‘real-time’ repo does and does not mean today, because the distinction matters commercially. The securities leg is increasingly capable of near real-time transfer — triparty optimisation, distributed ledger technology (DLT)-based collateral mobility, and in-production deployments at HQLAX and elsewhere have already demonstrated this. The cash leg remains the harder constraint, bound by real-time gross settlement (RTGS) systems, central bank money access, and payment system cut-offs that still operate on schedules set for a different era.
As a result, fully atomic delivery-versus-payment across both legs is still limited in reach. But coordinated settlement models, where the securities leg moves at DLT speed and the cash leg is tightly synchronised against RTGS windows, are already reducing latency and settlement risk to the point where intraday repo becomes commercially viable for a widening set of counterparties. The gap between what is technically possible and what is operationally routine is closing fast.
An operating model that is already emerging
The feasibility of intraday repo is no longer theoretical. Cleared repo activity continues to grow via CCPs such as Fixed Income Clearing Corporation (FICC) and Eurex Clearing, reducing bilateral exposure and unlocking balance sheet capacity while increasing the importance of precise intraday liquidity management. Collateral mobility across triparty and DLT-based venues is improving. And production deployments — not pilots — are already executing intraday repo at commercial scale. The J.P. Morgan and HQLAX intraday repo service, orchestrated across multiple ledgers and participant types, settles both cash and collateral with minute-level precision and accrues interest by the minute. It is one of the most technically demanding use cases in institutional digital finance, and it is running today.
What these deployments share is an architectural insight: intraday repo works when the underlying systems stay where they are, and a coordination layer sits above them to synchronise what each one does. That is the model the market is converging on.
The next upgrade for securities finance
Intraday repo is not a speculative future. It is the next step in the evolution of securities finance, and the building blocks are already in production. It reduces timing friction, improves coordination across fragmented infrastructure, and enables precise use of liquidity and collateral at the moment they are needed. In a market measured in tens of trillions, the compounding value of these gains is substantial.
The institutions that move first will not simply gain an operational edge. They will help define the market structure the next generation of repo activity runs on, and the orchestration networks that connect it.
A multi-trillion market hitting new highs
The scale of the opportunity is worth anchoring. In Europe, the International Capital Market Association’s (ICMA’s) 50th semi-annual survey (December 2025) put outstanding repo at a record €13.7 trillion, up 24.6 per cent year-on-year (YoY) — one of the sharpest expansions the survey has recorded. In the United States, the Office of Financial Research’s (OFR’s) new transaction-level data shows the repo market averaged approximately US$12.6 trillion in daily exposures in Q3 2025, roughly US$700 billion higher than prior estimates once non-centrally cleared bilateral repo is properly captured.
These figures are not directly comparable. The ICMA number is a point-in-time outstanding balance drawn from a survey sample; the OFR figure is an average of daily exposures across the full market. But the direction is unambiguous. Repo is growing, cleared activity is growing faster still, and infrastructure venues are following suit — Eurex Repo closed 2025 with average term-adjusted volumes up 20 per cent YoY to €406 billion, a new record.
In a market of this size, even marginal efficiency gains translate into material economic value. That is where intraday repo comes in.
A market that still moves too slowly
Despite its scale and sophistication, repo remains operationally fragmented. A typical transaction requires coordination across trading desks, treasury functions, triparty agents, custodians, central securities depositories (CSDs) such as Euroclear and Clearstream, and payment systems. These processes are largely sequential rather than synchronised, with limited real-time visibility into collateral availability, settlement status, or cash positioning. The result is structural inefficiency: excess liquidity buffers held as a precaution, delayed deployment of collateral, and missed opportunities to optimise funding and balance sheet usage.
Most of today’s repo workflow is still aligned to end-of-day settlement cycles and overnight funding horizons. That made sense in a world where intraday liquidity was a back office problem. It no longer does. Basel intraday liquidity monitoring, cleared margin calls, and the rise of same-day funding events have made intraday the horizon that matters — and the one the operating model has yet to catch up with.
Why intraday repo matters
Intraday repo addresses the fundamental limitation in today’s market: timing. Rather than waiting for overnight cycles to mobilise collateral and cash, intraday repo enables same-day or true intraday settlement, allowing firms to respond dynamically to margin calls, funding gaps, and collateral optimisation opportunities. A treasurer facing a mid-morning margin call no longer needs to pre-fund against it from an oversized liquidity buffer; the position can be funded when it arises and unwound before the day ends.
For banks, dealers, and asset managers, the economic case is both operational and financial. Tighter intraday liquidity management reduces the size of precautionary buffers. More efficient collateral utilisation increases velocity on high-quality assets. Faster response to funding and margin requirements reduces reliance on expensive contingent liquidity lines. Reduced operational friction cuts the cost of running a repo book. Aggregated across a balance sheet measured in hundreds of billions, these are not marginal gains.
Adoption depends on the ecosystem
The primary obstacle to intraday repo at scale is not technical. It is coordination. A repo transaction spans multiple institutions and infrastructures, and intraday settlement demands that all of them move in lockstep: collateral allocated, cash instructed, and both legs finalised within minutes rather than hours. Efficient execution therefore requires real-time alignment across custodians, CSDs, triparty agents, central counterparties (CCPs), and payment systems that were not originally designed to operate on that timeline.
This makes intraday repo a network problem rather than a single-firm solution. No individual bank, custodian, or CCP can unlock it alone. What is needed is an orchestration layer that coordinates collateral allocation, settlement instructions, and cash movements across existing systems, enabling interoperability without forcing anyone to rip and replace their core infrastructure. This is precisely the gap that emerging application-layer protocols are built to close — most notably Ownera’s FinP2P network which connects a community of regulated collateral and liquidity partners to ensure the resulting ecosystem is institution-led and built on trusted participants.
What ‘real-time’ actually means in repo
It is worth being precise about what ‘real-time’ repo does and does not mean today, because the distinction matters commercially. The securities leg is increasingly capable of near real-time transfer — triparty optimisation, distributed ledger technology (DLT)-based collateral mobility, and in-production deployments at HQLAX and elsewhere have already demonstrated this. The cash leg remains the harder constraint, bound by real-time gross settlement (RTGS) systems, central bank money access, and payment system cut-offs that still operate on schedules set for a different era.
As a result, fully atomic delivery-versus-payment across both legs is still limited in reach. But coordinated settlement models, where the securities leg moves at DLT speed and the cash leg is tightly synchronised against RTGS windows, are already reducing latency and settlement risk to the point where intraday repo becomes commercially viable for a widening set of counterparties. The gap between what is technically possible and what is operationally routine is closing fast.
An operating model that is already emerging
The feasibility of intraday repo is no longer theoretical. Cleared repo activity continues to grow via CCPs such as Fixed Income Clearing Corporation (FICC) and Eurex Clearing, reducing bilateral exposure and unlocking balance sheet capacity while increasing the importance of precise intraday liquidity management. Collateral mobility across triparty and DLT-based venues is improving. And production deployments — not pilots — are already executing intraday repo at commercial scale. The J.P. Morgan and HQLAX intraday repo service, orchestrated across multiple ledgers and participant types, settles both cash and collateral with minute-level precision and accrues interest by the minute. It is one of the most technically demanding use cases in institutional digital finance, and it is running today.
What these deployments share is an architectural insight: intraday repo works when the underlying systems stay where they are, and a coordination layer sits above them to synchronise what each one does. That is the model the market is converging on.
The next upgrade for securities finance
Intraday repo is not a speculative future. It is the next step in the evolution of securities finance, and the building blocks are already in production. It reduces timing friction, improves coordination across fragmented infrastructure, and enables precise use of liquidity and collateral at the moment they are needed. In a market measured in tens of trillions, the compounding value of these gains is substantial.
The institutions that move first will not simply gain an operational edge. They will help define the market structure the next generation of repo activity runs on, and the orchestration networks that connect it.
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