Daniel Carpenter, Head of regulation at Meritsoft, a Cognizant company:

“The Treasury’s proposals are very positive for the UK’s finance and banking industry. With exciting, bold, and innovative measures outlined, there’s a real opportunity for leaders in capital markets to direct this creative energy to some of the areas where innovation has traditionally lagged behind – in post-trade, for example. Whether it’s the low-tech and costly processes associated with onboarding and KYC, brokerage fees, trade settlement failures or transaction taxes, under investment has left a legacy of expensive inefficiencies in post-trade which are in need of attention.”

“We’ve seen an uptick in interest in blockchain as a solution to reduce the number of settlement fails – in particular after the GameStop incident. The proposed financial market infrastructure sandbox for digital innovation could go a long way to developing this and other technology-driven solutions, such as cloud and data digitisation and AI, to resolve a range of post-trade challenges. The UK financial services and banking industry has a chance to lead the way on improvements to global standards in post-trade processes but boards must prioritise this to avoid post-trade being left behind the front office and those operating in the primary markets.”