From Plumbing to Platform: What Comes Next for Financial Market Infrastructure (FMI)

By Andrew Quinn, Managing Director & Co-Founder, FIDEO

The next phase of FMI evolution will be defined less by technology theatre than by faster settlement, hybrid market architectures, operational resilience and the industry’s ability to build capability at scale.

1. Introduction

The next big competitive divide in finance will sit below the customer interface. It will be defined by how money moves, how assets settle, and how trust holds when markets become faster, more digital and more interconnected. For years, financial market infrastructures were described as the plumbing of finance.

That description now undersells their strategic importance. Exchanges, central securities depositories, clearing houses, custodians and real-time settlement systems are becoming strategic platforms that shape liquidity, collateral mobility, market access and innovation itself. That is why the FMI conversation is moving from back-office efficiency to market design. [1]

2. The next FMI will be hybrid

What we see coming next is not a clean handover from legacy infrastructure to distributed ledgers. It is a hybrid model. The US move to T+1 on 28 May 2024, ESMA’s recommendation that the EU transition on 11 October 2027, and Swift’s completion of the move to ISO 20022 after 22 November 2025 all point in the same direction - markets are becoming faster, more data-rich and far less tolerant of manual friction. [2][3][4]

At the same time, the ECB’s exploratory work with 64 participants and almost €1.6 billion

settled, followed by its Pontes and Appia dual-track plan, shows that official sector thinking has moved beyond proof-of-concept and towards interoperable settlement design. BIS Project Meridian FX reinforces the same message - tomorrow’s infrastructure will need RTGS and DLT to work together, not compete as rival worlds. [5][6][7]

3. Resilience becomes part of the proposition

The second change is that resilience is no longer a wrapper around infrastructure; it is part of the infrastructure proposition itself. DORA has applied across the EU since 17 January 2025, and the UK’s critical third-party regime is now in force for designated providers. [8][9]

That matters because FMI risk increasingly runs through cloud concentration, cyber dependencies, outsourced operations, third-party assurance and recovery planning. The market will increasingly reward infrastructures that can demonstrate endurance, recoverability and governance, not just speed.

In practice, we expect resilience testing, dependency mapping and board-level assurance to become much more visible parts of FMI strategy over the next few years.

4. Capability becomes the next control layer

The third shift is that the real bottleneck in FMI modernisation will not be code alone. It will be capability. IOSCO’s 2025 work suggests AI use in capital markets will continue to expand, especially in operations, surveillance and compliance, while supervisors remain focused on governance, data quality, model risk and oversight. [10]

In FMI environments, the near-term value of AI is likely to come less from autonomous decision-making and more from anomaly detection, exception triage, surveillance, document extraction and operational observability.

But none of that works without people and control frameworks that are ready for it. A practical example is the shift to faster settlement. Moving to T+1 (and potentially beyond) is not only a technology programme. It forces operating-model changes in exception management, asset servicing cut-offs, collateral workflows, and intraday liquidity planning.

In that context, resilience and governance determine whether automation delivers outcomes supervisors can understand and test.

That is why, at FIDEO, we increasingly see the journey in capability terms. Individual professionals need practical fluency in payments, market infrastructure, tokenisation, resilience and AI governance. Professional bodies and trade associations need credible, regulator-aligned learning that helps members interpret change consistently. Regulated entities need advisory, implementation support and upskilling to move from roadmap to execution. [11][12][13]

5. What comes next

The next phase of FMI evolution will be less about announcing innovation and more about proving adoption. We expect four themes to define that phase: shorter settlement cycles, interoperable forms of money and assets, more explicit operational and third-party resilience expectations, and more data-driven supervision.

The winners will not necessarily be the institutions with the loudest innovation narrative. They will be the ones that can turn experimentation into operating model, regulatory change into practical capability, and infrastructure modernisation into dependable market outcomes.

These shifts will reward infrastructures that can turn experimentation into operating model, regulatory change into practical capability, and infrastructure modernisation into dependable market outcomes. [5][6][8][11][12][13]

About FIDEO

FIDEO supports professionals and regulated firms navigating market infrastructure change, with a focus on capability-building, programmes, and advisory across payments, market infrastructure, resilience, and AI governance. [11][12][13]

Bibliography

[1] Bank of England. (2025). Renewed RTGS: Digital public infrastructure as a platform for innovation. Speech by Dave Ramsden, 29 April 2025.

[2] U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. (2024). SEC Chair Gensler Statement on Upcoming Implementation of T+1 Settlement Cycle. 21 May 2024.

[3] European Securities and Markets Authority. (2024). ESMA proposes to move to T+1 by October 2027. 18 November 2024.

[4] Swift. (2025). ISO 20022: Implementation; and ISO 20022 for Financial Institutions.

[5] European Central Bank. (2025). The Eurosystem’s exploratory work on new technologies for wholesale central bank money settlement. 30 June 2025.

[6] European Central Bank. (2025). ECB commits to distributed ledger technology settlement plans with dual-track strategy. 1 July 2025.

[7] Bank for International Settlements. (2025). Project Meridian FX: exploring synchronised settlement in FX. 24 April 2025.

[8] European Securities and Markets Authority. (2025). Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA).

[9] Bank of England. (2026). UK and EU regulators sign MoU to strengthen oversight of critical third parties; see also Operational resilience: Critical third parties to the UK financial sector.

[10] International Organization of Securities Commissions. (2025). Artificial Intelligence in Capital Markets: Use Cases, Risks, and Challenges.

[11], [12], [13] FIDEO. (2026).