Brian Steele, DTCC Managing Director, President, Clearing & Securities Services joined a panel of experts for a standing-room only session at the 2025 Sibos conference in Frankfurt on the importance of standards in processing and settling trades during Why Standards Matter – A Discussion with the ISSA Board. The conversation examined the many benefits of standardization, a look at the journey so far and what work remains to be done.
Standards turn principles into shared practice. When firms interpret data and rules the same way, processes run faster, with fewer breaks. The U.S. move to T+1 in 2024 showed the impact. Panelists agreed that broad adoption of common practices helped the industry transition smoothly, with higher same day affirmation rates and greater operational efficiency.
“ISSA has nine working groups tackling various aspects of the trade and settlement flow,” said Margaret Harwood Jones, Global Head, Financing and Securities Services with Standard Chartered Bank, referring to the International Securities Servicing Association, where she also serves as Board Chair. “There is hardly any work from any of these nine groups in which standards do not have a prominent place in the conversation.”
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In fact, standards address numerous industry challenges, making them beneficial to virtually every aspect of the trade and settlement flow—including dispute resolution.
“If people have the same interpretation of the facts, that helps a lot,” noted Paul Maley, Head of Corporate Bank Americas with Deutsche Bank. “When everyone knows what the rules are, it makes disputes a lot easier to resolve.”
“If you want to make access to capital markets cheaper and easier, standards are one of the best ways to do it,” said Steele.
Developing a Proactive Approach
However, markets are dynamic, continuously changing and developing. As a result, standards need to be regularly reviewed and updated to keep pace with market evolution, technological advancements and the introduction of new products.
“We’ve operated in more or less the same fashion for 50 years or more,” said SCB’s Jones. “We’ve certainly iterated over the years as changes required it, and that may have got us to this point just fine, but we need to start thinking about proactively putting in place new standards, rather than acting reactively.”
Emphasizing Adoption and Automation
To deliver real value to market participants, standards need to be widely adopted. And right now, that is not always the case.
“One of the real risks is that we develop and deploy a comprehensive set of standards, but then they are not adopted,” said Steele. “We need to ensure we create and communicate a powerful value proposition for standards adoption.”
Steele noted that in addition to the ongoing challenge of getting more market participants to embrace standards, there are still large areas of financial markets for which standards are either poorly adopted or insufficient.
“Today, there are entire asset classes that still rely heavily on manual processes,” added Steele. “We need standards for these classes so we can automate. Standards level the playing field and there are still many facets of our industry that would benefit by more widespread adoption of standards.”
Priority areas include deeper automation in post‑trade workflows and continued alignment on common message formats. Advancing ISO 20022 adoption across settlement and asset servicing can reduce exceptions and improve client outcomes. Expanding standards coverage for standing settlement instructions can further streamline matching and settlement. The industry’s next gains will come from proactive standardization plus automation, backed by clear value stories that drive adoption.
Standards reduce friction, increase transparency, and strengthen resilience. By committing to broad adoption and continuous improvement, market participants can unlock more efficient, consistent and innovative markets for years to come.