Top trends 2025: Capital markets

Perpetual KYC revolution
Perpetual Know Your Customer (pKYC) takes the traditional KYC solution and infuses it with modern technology, including AI and data analytics, to enable real-time customer monitoring and accurate escalation. This enhanced approach to managing client profiles and risk mitigation will streamline onboarding times and increase user-friendly experiences in 2025 and beyond.
Accelerating sustainable lending
Organisations everywhere need to drastically increase their investment in clean energy technology to be on track for net-zero goals. As firms prepare to invest more into their energy transitions, banks have a chance to leverage the opportunity by profiting from intermediation spreads and better risk-adjusted returns.
Changing investment landscape
Seeking lower fees, consistent market returns, and reduced risk, investors have largely turned to passive investing during the last decade. But as the investment landscape continues to shift, firms are adapting with innovation, consolidation, and an increasing focus on scalable, low-cost, and diversified investment products.

Efficiencies through collaboration
Inefficiencies in post-trade processing continue to adversely affect financial institutions, with costly legacy-system dependencies and fragmented processes preventing firms from realising the benefit of offshoring and automation. In 2025, a shift towards mutualisation and strategic outsourcing will reduce the cost of post-trade processing.
Capital efficiency
Geopolitical conflicts, inflation, and rising central bank rates are pushing financial firms to readjust their capital strategies. To offset these challenges, firms will revise booking models, restructure capital frameworks, develop tax-efficient structures, and shift to less capital-intensive products to increase overall capital efficiency.
Modernised resilient platforms
Technology limitations, new regulatory requirements, and increased cybersecurity challenges are pressuring financial entities to tackle the issue of replacing their costly legacy systems. A key technology trend for capital markets will include the migration towards more modern, resilient platforms that enable growth, enhance resiliency, increase scalability, and drive cost efficiency.

DLT & tokenisation
Since raising its profile from the rise of blockchain and cryptocurrencies, distributed ledger technology (DLT) has evolved to include a wider range of assets, including smart contracts and tokenisation. With the potential to transform processes and boost efficiency, the increasing integration of DLT and tokenisation will be a focus.
Leveraging generative AI
Global spending on artificial intelligence is expected to reach new highs, and capital market firms are looking to this blossoming technology to drive improvements in operational efficiency and customer experience. Aiming to strengthen their competitive edge, firms will continue to implement Gen AI strategies and operating models to enhance business value.
Global accelerated settlement
The 2024 implementation of a T+1 settlement cycle has yielded major benefits for North America, with the UK and EU now seeking to push forward with their own T+1 implementations during the coming year. Challenged by heavy landscape fragmentation and complexity, firms will look to recalibrate operating models, enhance data management, and modernise legacy technology to facilitate their successful T+1 migrations.
Transaction reporting optimisation
A recent wave of regulatory rewrites have brought significant change to trade and transaction reporting (T&TR). Firms will aim to manage these changes and stay on top of legacy reporting issues by shifting their focus to the reinvigorating operating models to prioritise efficiency and controls.