INTERVIEW ] At PostTrade 360 from 2-3 September 2026, OSTTRA’s Erik Petri and Carl Thornberg unpack survey findings that reveal the competitive edge hiding in derivatives post-trade workflows — where delays mean higher margin and tie up capital. Get the data quality right, though, and the same workflows unlock significant efficiencies: a much better portfolio view, sharper liquidity management, and the golden record that makes optimisation possible.
For as long as post-trade pros can remember, alpha lived in one place: the trading desk. Post-trade was what happened afterwards — the plumbing function nobody mentioned unless it broke.
New research from OSTTRA and Acuiti, surveying 62 senior executives across 45 global banks and clearing brokers, suggests that assumption no longer holds — and the timing isn’t an accident. The past few years have been dominated by geopolitical shocks, rising cybersecurity concerns and no shortage of talk about DLT and the resilience of post-trade processes as the backbone.
“There’s been a massive focus on geopolitical shocks, an increased awareness of cybersecurity, and a lot of talk about DLT — even though that hasn’t come to fruition,” notes Erik Petri, Head of Optimisation, OSTTRA.
78% of firms now say they’ve faced no significant vulnerabilities from external shocks, which, in Petri’s reading, means tactical era of post-trade investment is largely behind the industry. Nine in ten now see post-trade as a strategic area to invest in instead. Firms are starting to treat it as a second engine of outperformance — one that runs on capital efficiency, liquidity and speed rather than market calls.
The key insight
That shift carries a direct capital cost, and a direct capital reward. Firms with too many breaks in a netting set already face regulatory capital add-ons — so having your house in order has a very literal price attached. High-quality data flowing into more advanced workflows works the other way. Take “settle-to-market”: converting a variation margin transfer between counterparties into a settlement amount cuts the margin period of risk to a single day.
“Instead of having a transfer margin between two counterparties, you convert that into a settlement amount, which means that your margin period of risk decreases to one day — and, give or take, you can reduce the capital requirements by 55% on OTC derivatives,” explains Petri.
There’s more pressure coming. Petri points to a US regulatory consultation on the G-SIB framework, expected to conclude next year, that would move the measure from a single year-end snapshot to an average daily figure — meaning the more frequently a firm can compress and reduce notional, the lower that average becomes.
Put the sequence together and Petri’s own framing is clear: get your house in order in a timely manner, and that lets you optimise, and optimising is what buys the competitive edge — being able to provide clients with commission data sooner, offer a better bid-ask spread, and give clients a reason to choose you over a firm still catching up.
The data twist
The data problem, meanwhile, isn’t really a data-quality problem, says Carl Thornberg, OSTTRA’s head of Optimisation and Analytics Technology. It’s a data-repurposing problem.
“We don’t have quality issues really in the data — but when we want to repurpose it for new needs, it turns out that we do. That’s a lesson we’ve learned, and it’s something we need to think about more broadly when we start storing new data — not just for today’s purpose,” he explains.
The cost of getting that wrong isn’t only capital. It’s headcount. One bank told OSTTRA it has more than 50 employees whose day job is explaining away MTM differences — an operational drag. Data built only for its original purpose, Thornberg argues, is quietly expensive the moment a firm tries to make it work harder.
Who should take heed
This lands hardest for COOs, heads of operations, CFOs and chief risk officers at banks and clearing brokers — anyone who has historically had to budget as a cost line rather than an investment case. It’s also a wake-up call for anyone treating AI as a silver bullet: the research is candid that artificial intelligence is genuinely useful, but it isn’t the whole story, and neither is DLT, despite over a decade of promise. The gap is telling — 42% of firms are already running AI in live production, against just 11% for DLT.
Post-trade is no longer a back-office function to be minimised. It’s a strategic capability to be orchestrated, on a clear sequence — accelerate, then optimise, then differentiate — and the firms already on that path are finding a second source of alpha their competitors don’t yet know they’re missing.
Why now
Three forces are converging to force the issue. T+1 settlement has collapsed the time firms have to establish trade certainty, turning delays that were once tolerable into genuine settlement risk. Tightening capital rules — including the G-SIB shift above — mean every hour of trapped capital has a real, measurable cost. And operational resilience regulation such as DORA is forcing firms to prove they can withstand disruption, not just absorb it quietly. Together, they’ve turned post-trade from a function firms could afford to under-invest in into one they can no longer afford to.
Full findings and the fireside conversation with Carl Thornberg and Erik Petri (OSTTRA) at PostTrade 360° Stockholm, 2–3 September.
