DEEP LOOK | Some functions post-trade users won’t be able to do without in the new digital world. This piece looks at what those functions are, and argues the providers who deliver them, investing once rather than repeatedly for every new use case, rail or asset class, are in the running for top place.

TradFi and DeFi convergence and co-existence will happen, but right now, it’s a mess. PostTrade 360°’s news reporting tracks multiple blockchains, no common standards, isolated liquidity pools, and a decentralised dream repeatedly interrupted by the reality that cash still needs to settle. Tokenisation needs multiple pieces of traditional infrastructure working together at once, not just bilateral exchanges over a blockchain.

So this isn’t a digital assets story. It’s a future-of-post-trade-functions story, as we pass a checkpoint in the global tokenisation race and users assess which firms and functions to bet on for the remainder of 2026 and beyond — regardless of which chain, vendor or regulator wins, and who’s already proving each one out. Drawing together a year of PostTrade 360° reporting into one framework, this piece threads together the key capabilities forming its foundational and future chapters.

Tokenisation: Trust the process(es)? rephrases the question from whether markets will tokenise to whether the traditional processes underpinning trust, safety and liquidity can keep pace — and whether the industry can avoid paying twice to find out. Custody’s home improvement plan follows with the cost question: most digital assets infrastructure wasn’t designed to sit within a regulated institution. Firms making genuine progress treat digital assets as an extension of their standard operating model, not a separate build — extending mature risk, compliance, treasury and custody processes rather than duplicating them, with one clear view across custody, trading, settlement, financing and reporting.

It comes down, then, to which functions to get right, and with which partners — so as to avoid building the fourth parallel post-trade stack nobody asked for.

1. Cash and liquidity

The markets that have scaled fastest so far are the ones with direct access to central bank digital money. That’s why the cash leg — not the token — is the real gating factor. The industry still lacks a widely adopted digital settlement mechanism; stablecoins are the near-term candidate, and the Bank of England’s stablecoin regime, due later in 2026, is the single biggest swing factor in where that leg ends up living. Projects like the UK’s Digital Gilt Instrument and the ECB’s Pontes are being watched closely as the first attempts to put central bank money genuinely everywhere it’s needed. Cash is the common denominator across every DvP and PvP design, and how it’s structured now — pooled or fragmented — sets the operational boundaries for a decade.

Olaf Ransome’s blog Designing tomorrow’s financial market infrastructure suggests that Switzerland’s SIC (Swiss Interbank Clearing) and SIX CSD offer the underlying design principle: a single pool of liquidity serving both payments and securities settlement cut the net funding requirement across all payment activity to just 1–2% of gross. Any digital settlement build should be judged against that first: does it pool liquidity, or fragment it further?

2. Trust and control

Paradoxically, as single ledgers offering a single source of truth increase in number, reconciliation grows in importance, not less. Immutability does promise to remove the need for the endless golden-copy spreadsheets that batch processing has relied on for decades, and the shift from end-of-day batch cycles toward continuous, intraday processing is already under way. But a synchronised ledger can still carry bad data, and in a hybrid world where assets move between tokenised and traditional rails, reconciliation is the mechanism that validates tokenised positions actually correspond to the underlying assets — the control layer checking the digital record against economic reality.

Sitting alongside it: legal and regulatory clarity. Vinod Jain’s blog Why reconciliations are DLT’s unsung power tool explains that a DLT security minted on a public blockchain isn’t treated the same as an intermediated, book-entry security — it can trigger additional cryptoasset reporting obligations and higher capital requirements under Basel rules. Regulator-grade reporting, maker-checker controls, independent key recovery and entity segregation are the baseline; legal certainty over what a digital security actually is in a given jurisdiction is the layer underneath that.

Our T+1 readiness survey – industry is poised for execution article shows the traditional-rails proof of the same principle. The ValueExchange’s second survey for the EU T+1 Industry Committee found 73% of firms citing automation as a challenge — many still behind schedule on automating allocations, confirmations and standing settlement instructions specifically. The lesson transfers directly to digital rails: whichever functions T+1 forces firms to automate now — matching, corporate actions, SSIs — are the same ones that determine whether a hybrid tokenised/traditional environment scales.

3. Mobility

This is where the money already is. A Nasdaq and ValueExchange survey reveals the largest banks operate across up to 65 custody locations and forgo up to $340 million a year in lost interest income because collateral sits immobile exactly when it’s needed. The Eurex/HQLAX/Clearstream model is the proof it’s solvable: collateral moves onto a ledger and ownership transfers within minutes, but the assets never leave their custody location and Clearstream stays the bookkeeper of record — posting time cut from T+2 to 20 minutes, no change to the collateral rulebook.

The market treats custody the same way: holding an asset in custody, digital or traditional, is becoming a commodity function, and the winners will be built on wallets, key management, compliance and reporting engineered once and reused across custody, staking, lending and collateral — not bolted on per product.

4. Interoperability and standards

This is the function where the digital and traditional worlds are fighting the identical fight. The infrastructure that solves for multi-ledger capability, treating the mainframe as just one ledger among several rather than the exception, takes that complexity away from everyone building on top of it. The identical argument is playing out in traditional infrastructure, as CSD interoperability: convergence by design, or by default? shows the industry isn’t resting on its laurels: Euronext’s alternative CSD framework goes live 21 September 2026; Brussels’ Market Integration and Supervision Package proposes a hub-and-spoke model to connect investors and CSDs across borders; and ECSDA advocates reusing existing CSD-to-hub connections rather than authorising new bilateral ones from scratch. Whether you’re wiring a blockchain bridge or a CSD link, the strategic question is the same: does this reduce fragmentation, or just relocate it?

5. What stays stubbornly manual

Corporate actions, asset servicing and legal entity data remain the most manual, most exception-prone processes in the back office, and they’re still largely unsolved on-chain. That’s not a reason to deprioritise them — it’s the opposite. These are the functions where automation hasn’t caught up with ambition, which makes them some of the most investable, least glamorous bets on the list.

The investment question

None of this is really a question of what to stop paying for. Two worlds — tokenised and traditional — are going to run in parallel for years, and the functions above are the ones staying load-bearing throughout: cash and liquidity, trust and control, mobility, interoperability, and the manual processes nobody’s cracked yet. The question for every post-trade professional deciding where to place five years of budget isn’t “is this digital or traditional?” It’s: which of these functions is this provider actually solving, and are they building toward the tipping point, or around it?

This top five is drawn from a year of PostTrade 360° reporting — if we’ve missed a function you think belongs on the list, we’d love to hear from you.