The continuous processing encouraged by America’s T+1 transition is the strongest current driver of operational innovation in capital-market businesses – or so a Thursday panel at the Deutsche Börse Group’s Global Funding and Financing Forum proposed on Thursday morning.

The stage content of the Global Funding and Financing Summit 2025 was hosted under so-called Chatham House rules, permitting reporting, including that by PostTrade 360°, under the condition that presented facts and views not be attributed to individuals.

Innovation is easily pictured as something that happens overnight. Yet, the approach it takes to succeed is more about daring to challenge ones fundamental processes and the way value creation is allocated across the industry. This was one of the perspectives promoted by the panel on stage in Luxembourg.

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Panellists were … 
Steve Everett, TMX 
Jens Hachmeister, Deutsche Börse
Matthieu Herbeau, Banque de France,
guided by session moderator Barnaby Nelson, The Value Exchange.

An audience poll indicated that most of the innovation at market participant firms is still driven by regulation, rather than by their independent campaigns to increase efficiency. This being the case despite continuing extreme cost pressure in the asset management market.

To a high degree, there is still a divide between firms that stay conservative in their way of doing things, versus those who bravely embrace new solutions. Even so, there is widening curiousity about expanding existing capabilities by connecting new ones, for example DLT-driven solutions for issuance or collateral mobility. Deutsche Börse’s digital CSD D7 is now around the 600,000 mark in the number of issues it has produced, and the Banque de France has made itself a prominent issuer of central bank digital currency (CBDC), needed for the payment leg in Europe’s pilot exploration of delivery-versus-payment solutions.