DTCC Executives comment on the year ahead
Several key executives from The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) have outlined their views for the year ahead:
Frank La Salla (pictured) – President, CEO and Director of DTCC
While the macroeconomic and geopolitical environment will remain uncertain in 2025, I’m optimistic about our industry’s future and the opportunity for DTCC to lead on critical initiatives that mitigate risk, enhance resilience and strengthen market structure. In that sense, this year will largely be a continuation of 2024 in that we must continue to execute flawlessly on large-scale industry implementations. On the heels of the smooth T+1 conversion, we will galvanize the industry and provide strong leadership on the transition to the SEC’s U.S. Treasury Clearing rule.
In addition, innovation will be an area of sharp focus for our firm. We’ve already been integrating digitization, cloud and AI into our capabilities, and we’ll continue to advance this important work in the coming years. However, we also recognize that not all innovation will be underpinned by technology, which means that we’ll also focus on opportunities to improve market safety and efficiency through process enhancements, cross-margining agreements and other creative approaches.
Technologies such as blockchain and the cloud will play a crucial role in the build out and interconnectedness of the digital financial ecosystem. DTCC will continue to serve as a strategic partner to the industry by advancing acceptance and adoption of digital assets, focusing on opportunities to tokenize collateral and funds, and leveraging our existing clearing and settlement capabilities to facilitate the listing of digital funds on exchanges as well as secondary trading. We’ll also continue to advance our use of AI where it will be strategically beneficial to the client experience.
Lynn Bishop – Chief Information Officer
We continue to focus on upgrading and modernizing our technology to provide clients and the industry with innovative services and capabilities they need today and in the future. In 2025, one of our top priorities will be readying our IT platforms and client-facing applications to support US Treasury Clearing, which represents one of the most significant changes to market structure in decades. In addition, given the evolving threat landscape, we’re committed to strengthening our resiliency and partnering with our clients and technology providers to ensure financial markets continue to operate seamlessly.
We’re also investing in AI and exploring how it can improve the client experience as well as to enhance our own productivity and efficiency. As AI continues to mature, it becomes essential to upskill employees with a foundational knowledge of AI to drive innovation and pursue practical and responsible use cases.
Nadine Chakar – Managing Director, Global Head of DTCC Digital Assets
2024 was a pivotal year for digital assets, and we’re seeing strong momentum toward adoption. More and more institutional investors – on both the buy- and sell-side – continue to be getting engaged with this technology. We also saw a lot of progress on the regulatory front, with the SEC’s approval of Ethereum and Bitcoin ETFs in the US in 2024, and the first stages of the EU’s MiCA, the first-ever blockchain-related asset regulation, coming into effect.
We still have our work cut out for us in 2025 and beyond. While we’ve clearly proven the merits of this technology, it’s time to put real applications on the ledger using tokenization. As we move beyond pilots and start putting projects into production, we’ll need to make sure we’re collectively driving toward an end goal: building an efficient digital market infrastructure and standards. Collaboration is the core ingredient that will help us capture the promise that digital assets hold.
DTCC is excited to be at the forefront, leading the charge for industry acceptance and greater adoption of tokenization solutions. We are proud to have further advanced this work with the launch of DTCC Digital Launchpad, an industry sandbox that’s bringing together financial market participants and clearing the path to scalable adoption of digital assets. In 2025, we will continue to focus on establishing the digital market infrastructure of the future, showcasing how we can deliver the same efficiencies for digital assets as we do in traditional markets today, while also ensuring smooth market operation, transparency and liquidity.
Timothy Cuddihy – Managing Director and Group Chief Risk Officer at DTCC
As the threat landscape evolves and the nature of risk takes on new forms in the coming year, DTCC will continue to focus on strong risk management practices and robust operational resilience. Effective risk management is imperative given the heightened geopolitical risks, macro-economic uncertainty, cyber threats, and pace of technology change. Given DTCC’s role in mitigating risk, we are always focused on assessing and protecting against multiple and interconnected risks to the global financial system.
To ensure defense against ever-evolving risks, firms must embrace a holistic approach to risk management, combining real-time threat detection, advanced automation, and collaboration across the financial ecosystem. The key to navigating this environment lies in building and implementing adaptable, forward-looking frameworks that not only address today’s risks but forward-looking risk assessments to prepare for dynamic challenges ahead.
Brian Steele – Managing Director, President, Clearing & Securities Services at DTCC (KRISTI)
The expansion of U.S. Treasury clearing is a huge priority for us in 2025. With deadlines fast approaching, DTCC is fully committed to a successful implementation, and we are working closely with the industry to educate clients on the impacts and preparations needed to ensure a smooth transition and to deliver upon the transparency and risk management benefits of such a move. Driving capital and liquidity efficiencies for the industry is a keen focus area for DTCC, which is why we are doubling down to improve our solutions (i.e. cross margining arrangements, creation of default fund, etc.) and enable our clients to maximize capital while complying with mandates such as Basel III rules, etc.
At the same time, we stand ready to assist the industry as global accelerated settlement efforts progress in EU and UK. We will continue to engage our clients through various forums as we look to expand and develop new products and services such as cleared securities lending, optimizing the use of Collateral, increase the usability and access of our data, and improve our clients’ experience by modernizing platforms and increasing resiliency. We are also actively preparing to support our clients through regulatory change efforts impacting RDS (i.e. Canada, JFSA Phase III and HKMA rewrite) and continue to invest in risk management excellence to protect the industry.
Michele Hillery – Managing Director, Head of Repository & Derivatives Services
2024 was a significant year in which the derivatives markets were shaped by substantial regulatory reporting updates. Global refits across North America, UK, EU, Singapore, Japan and Australia delivered enhanced transparency and greater efficiency across global capital markets, as firms tackled legacy trades and aligned reporting across jurisdictions, with swift action and robust data strategies proving crucial to implementation success.
The pace of regulatory change shows no sign of slowing in 2025, with global jurisdictions including Canada, Japan and Hong Kong preparing to go live with the UPI reporting as part of the derivatives trade reporting rules.
To ensure preparedness, firms should continue to build on lessons learned from past implementations. Early preparation and collaboration, continuous adaptation, and strong industry partnerships will all be critical to ensuring compliance and strengthening post-trade infrastructure and reporting as the industry continues to evolve.
Laura Klimpel – Managing Director and Head of DTCC’s Fixed Income and Financing Solutions
2024 has been a pivotal year in industry preparations for the expanded UST clearing as a result of the SEC mandate, resulting in a significant and continued growth in fixed income clearing volumes. Throughout the year, FICC remained focused on providing the most efficient and resilient clearing services for the industry. On September 30, FICC’s Government Securities Division saw record daily volumes of over $10 Trillion and its Sponsored Service alone reached peak daily volumes over USD$1.7 trillion, creating USD$846 billion in balance sheet savings across the industry. FICC is built for scale, and the record-breaking clearing volumes seen over the course of the past year are testament to its ability to meet the growing demand.
To help the industry prepare for the 2025 and 2026 regulatory deadlines, FICC has made significant strides in advancing how we will support done-away clearing in the Treasury market. Both of our indirect access models, the Sponsored Service and the Agent Clearing Service which was recently approved by the SEC, support done-away activity. We are also addressing remaining challenges around accounting implications – with resolution anticipated imminently – and will continue to roll out innovative products and services that create new margin and capital efficiencies for our clients. Looking ahead, we will continue to listen and respond to the needs of the industry to ensure that firms are well prepared for the Treasury clearing mandate and ensure a seamless implementation.
Tim Lind – Managing Director of DTCC Data Services
2024 was a year of transformation for asset servicing, driven by data-centric approaches that leverage new data sources to enable greater integrity and insight into valuation, risk management and liquidity dynamics. AI and cloud-based data marketplaces will accelerate transformation of the data supply chain by replacing point-to-point connectivity between institutions with collaborative alternatives that focus on sharing, rather than sending data.
As a leading market infrastructure provider and trusted partner to American issuers, we are poised to lead this change. DTCC will harness its data assets and innovative technologies in service to the capital markets industry, and bring issuers, intermediaries and investors closer together than previously imagined.
Val Wotton – Managing Director and General Manager of DTCC Institutional Trade Processing
2024 marked the successful implementation of T+1 in the US, which delivered substantial risk mitigation and operational and cost efficiency benefits to market participants. Under the new timeline, over 95% of transactions are meeting the affirmation criteria, a notable improvement from the 73% affirmation rate under T+2. Market participants have also benefitted from the significant reduction in margin requirements, allowing them to make better use of their capital and resources, while simultaneously reinforcing financial stability.
Global accelerated settlement cycles will continue to be the key theme for market participants in 2025, with attention shifting to implementation in the UK and Europe. DTCC wholly supports the recently published UK’s Accelerated Settlement Taskforce Recommendations which focus on post-trade automation as a T+1 enabler, and ESMA’s recently issued Final Report, which calls for automation and harmonization across the EU region in order to make the move to a T+1 settlement cycle. We recommend that market participants approach T+1 implementation in the UK and Europe as an opportunity to evaluate holistically at their middle and back-office functions and assess how they can increase operational efficiency through automation and standardization through central matching solutions that enable same day confirmation.
