December 02, 2025- The march to T+0 will be led by technology providers.
Although North American securities markets navigated the move to a T+1 trade settlement cycle in 2024 without much in the way of major incident, the financial services industry is not prepared to take the next step to T+0.
Making the leap to same-day, or even instantaneous settlement will require a much deeper transformation of market structure and workflow processes.
“To achieve the ambitious goal of T+0, financial services firms of all types will have to rely on contributions from technology providers who can fully harness the power of advanced technology and innovations to completely automate the settlement process,” says Audrey Costabile, Senior Analyst for Crisil Coalition Greenwich Market Structure & Technology and author of Are We Ready for T+0 Settlement?
A Change in Technology and Mentality
Although the industry has largely accepted T+0 as an inevitability at some point, manual tasks that persist in the process make further compression of the settlement cycle impossible today.
Despite limitations that prevent the shift to shorter settlement times, industry leaders have expressed great enthusiasm about T+0, and planning and development to get to instantaneous settlement is already underway in various pockets of the market. This shift will require efforts and changes that go well beyond anything required for global adoption of the T+1 ecosystem.
“Despite the availability of technology for accelerated settlement, many firms chose to handle the move to T+1 not by modernizing workflows, but, instead, by hiring more staff to simply work faster and harder,” says Audrey Costabile. “A change in industry mentality is vital to foster a completely new global ecosystem.”
Technology firms play a major role in this changing mentality. In a collaboration with InterSystems during Q1 2025, Crisil Coalition Greenwich interviewed global capital markets leaders to better understand this progression from T+1 to T+0. These Industry leaders believe tech companies are nimbler than some of the large industry infrastructure firms facilitating settlement and key back-office workflows today.
Technology providers are also better positioned to use AI, ML and other solutions to catch reconciliation issues quickly – and even predict them – paving the way for fixes without human intervention via the development of intelligent automation in real-time workflows.
“Ultimately, financial industry leaders believe the technology platform that supports the shift to an accelerated settlement cycle will likely be a combination of internal builds, third-party systems and contributions from both capital markets and innovators from other industries supporting T+0,” says Audrey Costabile.