From accelerated settlement to AI-powered back offices, DTCC’s Rebecca Ashton discusses how market participants are rethinking post-trade systems.
This article first appeared in Financial News on November 11, 2025.
Since joining DTCC in October 2024, Rebecca Ashton has redefined the firm’s consulting strategy and built a global team of specialists focused on helping clients navigate post-trade transformation. Under her leadership, DTCC now offers strategic consulting as a proprietary service for the first time—a move that brings DTCC’s specialist expertise to its 8,000-strong client community and beyond.
Q: DTCC Consulting serves a wide array of financial institutions. Given the transformation in the market and the diversity of your clients, what are the main challenges they’re facing and how do you tailor your approach to address their needs?
We offer specialist consulting on post-trade operations to a broad client base—from other financial market infrastructures (FMIs), Tier 1 banks and buy-side institutions, to corporates, data providers and insurance firms.
While each firm’s individual circumstances differ, we see a common set of challenges shaping the market: evolving regulations, squeezed margins, rapid technological change and evolving market infrastructure dynamics like accelerated settlement.
Clients must prioritize investments that will deliver measurable efficiencies. Our role is to help them define those priorities, whether that’s modernizing legacy systems, preparing for accelerated settlement or building scalable control frameworks for regulatory reporting.
Q: Europe and the U.K. are set to move to T+1 settlement in October 2027, and the automation of back-office processes is critical to a successful transition. Is the industry prepared?
The move to T+1 in the EU and U.K. is a positive step for the industry. Not only will it bring additional efficiencies and reduced risk across the financial ecosystem, but it will also provide a strong incentive to help modernize market infrastructures and market participant firms.
But we can’t ignore the unique complexity of T+1 implementation in Europe. Shortened settlement cycles compress the time available for post-trade processes, and meeting these deadlines is further complicated by Europe’s fragmented market structure.
The number one operational challenge for firms is data management. To settle on a T+1 basis, market participants need accurate, timely, standardized data; not only their own, but their counterparties’ as well. Poor data quality means trade mismatches and settlement fails, and counterparties’ data quality affects matching rates and settlement. We can help clients assess their data flows, identify gaps in enrichment or reconciliation processes and leverage automation to improve straight-through-processing rates.
Many financial institutions in the EU and U.K. have made strong progress in preparing for T+1. However, according to a survey led by the U.K. Accelerated Settlement Taskforce, up to 26% of firms operating in the region will miss a key milestone: the December 2026 market deadline for allocations on T+01.
With only two years to go, firms must be single-mindedly focused on their preparations for the T+1 transition in Europe.
Q: Several jurisdictions have been undergoing regulatory rewrites in the past couple of years. What changes are creating the biggest lift for firms?
We support firms of all sizes in responding to regulatory change. Much of our current work focuses on control frameworks—the system of checks and procedures that ensure regulatory reporting is accurate and auditable. When rules change, these must be updated.
Over the past year, we’ve seen multiple overlapping rewrites, from EU derivatives rules to market regulators updating their rules. The rewrites of the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID II) have been the most demanding. Both EU and U.K. regulators are revisiting the technical standards, particularly for non-equity instruments, and some divergence is emerging. We don’t know exactly what this will look like yet, but market participants are having to allocate significant resources to respond.
We advise firms to build processes and technology that let them separate reporting by jurisdiction and leverage the overlaps. That way, they can adapt in a phased, predictable way without re-engineering everything when their requirements change.
Q: New technologies are reshaping post-trade operations. Which developments are most promising?
As consultants, we’re technology-agnostic. That said, artificial intelligence (AI) has significant potential to transform post-trade operations.
One area where AI is showing promise is regulatory reporting. To apply AI in this context, you need standardized data and processes, and banks are starting to adopt standards like the Common Domain Model (CDM) to represent trades and lifecycle events. That allows AI models to automate reporting and adapt reporting processes when rules change, producing explainable results.
The CDM underpins Digital Regulatory Reporting (DRR), an industry initiative designed to cut the cost and complexity of regulatory reporting. DTCC supports the adoption of these standards by, for example, integrating DRR with its Global Trade Repository, enabling clients to automate this function.
Then there’s tokenization, which helps financial institutions convert traditional securities into programmable, real-time transferable tokens, improving collateral mobility, settlement efficiency and capital utilization. DTCC has developed infrastructure to connect traditional post-trade systems with digital asset networks, including a new tokenized collateral management platform that lets firms mobilize tokenized securities as collateral in real time.
Q: What’s next for DTCC Consulting?
Our aim is to bring value to the wider industry—all firms should be able to benefit from our expertise. Currently, we’re focused on DTCC clients and helping them to derive synergies for the DTCC products they’re using.
But our ambition goes further; we want to become the go-to partner for the wider industry and help market participants with strategic, actionable solutions grounded in deep industry expertise.
To understand how DTCC is shaping the future of post-trade, click here.
Source: 1 “Accelerated Settlement in the UK Q1 | 2025 Pulse Survey Key Findings”, the ValueExchange, 2025