From Digitisation to Orchestration: The Next Challenge Facing Market Infrastructure

A Rebuilding Decision

In 2021 we made a decision to completely rebuild iActs® - an entirely new tech stack - not least because it was evident that many legacy operational models within financial markets were becoming unsustainable. We also felt that by the time we'd come through that development cycle (the here and now), we'd be very well placed to support an industry evolving toward increasingly distributed operational models.

What we perhaps underestimated was the pace at which market-event processing itself would continue fragmenting into specialised platforms, utilities and infrastructure providers.

The Market in Motion

Today, large parts of the market are modernising - proxy voting, syndicated loans, data distribution, transfer agency, to name a few.

Much of this change is driven by a combination of things: interoperability requirements, regulatory evolution and growing pressure to move beyond legacy infrastructure. So it's no surprise that the largest participants in the market are investing in strategic initiatives around infrastructure designed to improve transparency, interoperability and lifecycle efficiency across individual segments of the market.

Responding to a Growing Challenge

Yet despite this progress, a broader operational challenge remains - and not just remains, but is growing.

For Investment Managers and the institutional clients they serve, this challenge is acutely felt. Operating across multiple fragmented ecosystems - and often acting as the coordination point between them - they are, more often than not, the ones absorbing the cost of failure that fragmented infrastructures produce: missed elections, incomplete disclosure chains, delayed responses to time-critical events, to name but a few.

And of course it isn't just Investment Managers. This extends across the market - custodians, asset servicers, counterparties and infrastructure providers alike - all facing the increasingly complex task of orchestrating workflows across multiple standards, regulatory models and operational frameworks.

Looking Ahead

So the challenge is no longer simply one of digitisation.

It's one of operational coordination and governance across fragmented ecosystems - and that is a meaningfully different problem.

Increasingly, success will depend not on isolated workflows or proprietary silos, but on interoperable, API-driven orchestration platforms capable of processing multiple event types, across differing infrastructures and systems, for multiple market participants - and doing so with process governance to the fore.