When people talk about innovation in financial services lately, the conversation almost always starts with private markets or digital assets. New structures, broader access, and a push beyond institutional investors dominate the conversation. While exciting, some of the most important innovations are showing up in funds structure and accounts design. Most often, this looks and feels incremental but collectively, it’s reshaping who investing works for and how people are building long‑term financial security.
Consider fund structures. Exchange‑traded funds, which many would argue started the acceleration of innovation in fund structuring, now hold roughly $14 trillion in assets in the U.S. Interval funds, once perceived as niche, have moved steadily into the mainstream as investors seek exposure to less liquid assets with more predictability. Collective investment trusts continue to gain share inside retirement plans because they’re efficient, scalable, and cost effective.
In most cases, the underlying investments aren’t new, but the wrapper is and it’s continuing to redefine the rules of engagement. Change the wrapper and you can change the investor experience.
That same enablement pattern is playing out in account design. Account types have always reflected public policy priorities like retirement, education and long-term savings. But the world the original policies were built for is shifting, and so are the accounts. Careers are less linear and educational paths are more varied. Longevity is increasing and households look different than they did a generation ago. As a result, account design is evolving at record speed. New tax advantaged savings vehicles, like Trump Accounts, planned to go live in a few short weeks, are aimed at addressing persistent savings and investment participation. The intent behind these ideas is clear; the challenge is in the execution.
What’s going unremarked, as it often does, is the quiet infrastructure making this innovation possible – today, and for the last nearly 50 years.
"Change the wrapper and you can change the investor experience."
For decades, financial market infrastructure platforms have provided the shared foundation that brings firms together, allowing for a seamless and optimized investor experience. This enables accounts and their investable products to survive job changes, provider changes, and life events without losing integrity along the way. A tax incentive or policy change alone doesn’t create access; it’s the work behind the scenes to make it an operational reality that does.
The risk right now is that we talk about expanding access as if it were only a product or policy challenge. Foundationally, though, it’s also an infrastructure one. Incentives can be well-designed and wrappers can be modernized, but without implementing a shared, trusted platform, access will fragment. If the industry wants adoption of the next generation of tax‑advantaged accounts and fund structures, infrastructure can’t be an afterthought.
This is where DTCC’s role has mattered – often invisibly by design – for decades. Services like Fund/SERV and ACATS, as well as core clearing and settlement capabilities, have standardized how investors move assets, change accounts, or buy new products. Common identifiers and consistent processing enabled the estimated 65x growth of mutual funds since the 1980s. Rules embedded directly in the system, rather than recreated by each firm, lowered cost and reduced friction. This streamlined defined contribution plans, retirement accounts, and 529s. Ultimately, it allowed everyday Americans to get access to financial products faster as life events happen.
Together, we created a system resilient enough to support innovation that doesn’t break when something new is introduced. History has taught us that the answer is not to rebuild the system each time; it’s to evolve what already works by extending it so new products can operate reliably and affordably at scale. This is why we’re excited to announce our enablement of services for Trump Accounts on our existing infrastructure. These incremental changes may not sound like innovation in the way it’s usually celebrated, but this operational continuity will deliver the next generation of account design.
"If the industry wants adoption of the next generation of tax‑advantaged accounts and fund structures, infrastructure can’t be an afterthought."
Infrastructure ultimately enables savings to compound quietly in the background. It’s what runs the system that helps pay for college and allow people to retire with dignity. The next wave of innovation won’t be defined only by what’s new on the surface, but by whether the foundation underneath it is strong enough to last and flexible enough to adapt. The best financial systems don’t demand attention, they earn trust by working year after year, generation after generation.