INTERVIEW | Cloud adoption in post-trade is being tested under market stress. At PostTrade 360° ‘s conference on 2–3 September, financial market infrastructures already operating in the cloud will assess how well it’s working in practice. From the cloud services providers’ side, Alex Mirarchi of Amazon Web Services (AWS) will outline how partnerships with FMIs have evolved, and what’s driving the next phase of cloud transformation.

ChatGPT’s launch in November 2022 set off accelerated innovation by frontier labs and rapid industry adoption, sparking an investment frenzy and ongoing debate about Gen AI and its future. That AI-driven volatility is now testing post-trade market infrastructure like never before.

For exchanges, clearing houses and CSDs, the volatility has a sudden impact, especially overnight. Overnight systems typically run at low capacity, built around batch cycles rather than sudden shocks. A single tweet can unleash a surge of trades, margin calls and settlement instructions that pile up and strain legacy post-trade systems.

Alex Mirarchi, head of business development for exchanges, market infrastructure and trading at AWS, says the need for agility — a modern platform with the scalability and elasticity to react quickly — is mainly what’s driving infrastructure providers to modernise their core systems.

AWS has worked with FMIs for nearly two decades, largely through strategic partnerships with market infrastructure operators whose clearing, settlement and data platforms must run under heavy regulatory scrutiny, with little tolerance for error.

A nearly two-decade partnership reaches a new phase

AWS and Nasdaq are one such example. At PostTrade 360’s conference, Nasdaq and AWS will discuss the evolution of their longrunning strategic partnership. The two firms have jointly enabled core matching engine clearing, settlement, data platforms and CSD systems to run fully in the cloud. 

In 2025, Nasdaq and AWS’s partnership entered a new phase when Nasdaq announced it would migrate its Nordic Market exchanges to AWS in its Sweden data centre. The exchange operator also unveiled its Eqlipse solutions portfolio, hosted natively on AWS, for the complete trade lifecycle, including matching engines and clearing systems. 

That same year, drawing on their experience across the trade lifecycle, the firms announced their jointly developed modernisation blueprint for global financial market infrastructures. As part of this blueprint, Nasdaq has expanded its modernisation partnership with both Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) and Mexico’s Grupo BMV. More recently, Bolsas y Mercados Argentinos (BYMA) became the first FMI in Latin America to host their core settlement clearing workloads in the cloud, and is the first go-live of Nasdaq’s Eqlipse clearing solution on AWS.

Momentum builds 

This blueprint, combined with AWS bringing newer technologies such as GenAI to post-trade, has had what Mirarchi calls a multiplier effect. “The net result of this has been a flywheel of innovation: as more firms migrate their systems to AWS and materially transform their businesses, more firms follow suit,” he says.  

A wave of recent regulatory and operational milestones marks a step change in post-trade workloads moving to the cloud. These include:

  • The Options Clearing Corporation  In 2022, OCC became the first Systemically Important Financial Market Utility (SIFMU) to receive a Notice of No Objection from the SEC for its proposal to adopt cloud infrastructure. 
  • London Clearing House (LCH) has publicly shared that it is running its clearing systems on AWS, with a tertiary onpremises architecture using AWS Outposts.
  • The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation announced it is working with AWS to modernize its core clearance and settlement systems and risk applications.
  • The Australian Stock Exchange went live with its CHESS replacement on AWS.

Why the shift is accelerating

The drivers, Mirarchi argues, are structural. “The need to modernise and update systems is a constant,” he says. “But if you zoom out and look at market trends, every year there are more trading activity and more highvolatility days.”

Legacy systems buckle under those extremes.

“These market dynamics strain systems that don’t have the scalability and elasticity of the cloud,” Mirarchi says. “The demands of modern markets – more trading volumes, more high-volatility days, shorter settlement cycles (T+1), and the march to 24/5 and eventually 24/7 trading across all asset classes – require greater resiliency and agility. This means access to scalable compute infrastructure and modern data architectures, modern data tools for analysis and pipelines, as well as GenAI and agentic AI to streamline and enhance efficiency.”

For market operators, Mirarchi’s key insight is this: “The centre of gravity in posttrade is shifting to the cloud,” Mirarchi says. “FMIs across the world are leveraging the cloud’s broad set of services along with tools like GenAI, to modernise and drive efficiencies across the entire process.”

And with tokenisation, new asset classes and the push toward roundtheclock markets, the need for speed and innovation is only growing.

“There’s a transformation taking place in posttrade that’s been building for years,” Mirarchi says. “Now it’s entering a new phase, and the systems supporting it need to be ready for what comes next.”

• For more information about the PostTrade 360° conference happening on 2-3 September 2026 and to register, click here