2026 Outlook Market Technology: Dawn of a New Operating Reality

The global financial system finds itself at a new inflection point with the beginning of 2026. As innovation proliferates and change accelerates, traditional operating models are increasingly challenged by the demands of continuous, real-time markets.

This points toward a "new normal" where the scope of mission-critical systems is expanding. For market providers, this demands an assessment of technology and infrastructure to ensure performance and resilience amid a world wherein operations will soon rarely have a breather to pause, update and maintain.

Additionally, all this structural change is occurring against the backdrop of advances in digital assets, cloud and artificial intelligence (AI). In this context, 2026 promises to be a consequential year: One that puts the emphasis on decisive platform strategy and modernization efforts to become more agile, scalable and resilient.
 

Before diving in too deeply to what’s ahead, let’s review the year prior in market technology:

• Volumes and volatility continued their upward trajectory. Driven by sustained retail participation, geopolitical tensions and seismic market events, these surges observed throughout 2025 likely tested capacity and limits across the industry. These impacts were felt across the value chain, from exchanges and marketplaces to central counterparties and custodians.
• Although these circumstances persisted, the sector continued to function effectively and resiliently, especially those having invested in underlying technology. However, for legacy systems pushed to the brink by volumes and volatility, their immediate and long-term sustainability seems more tenuous, costly and risk-laden.
• Data became an even bigger priority. Millions more trades a day create billions more data points and require a comprehensive infrastructure strategy for market operators that not only want to achieve efficiency but leverage AI and other technology-fueled innovations. Data quality, accessibility and manipulability are all crucial to training AI models that can be deployed for internal optimization and external client services.

Notably, these trends developed amid a backdrop of accelerated and fundamental change fueled by 24-hour trading and digital assets (not only cryptocurrencies but also collateral tokenization in post-trade workflows). These trends are set to transform the infrastructure needs of market operators, lead to new infrastructure requirements such as distributed-ledger technology and blockchains rails to mobilize collateral that will rewrite the operating playbook over 2026. 
 

Importantly, operators will need to manage change without adding complexity, not a light duty as the very mechanics of markets are reworked. Yet, precision and efficiency can be achieved with a concentrated focus on the change drivers and architecting around them. Capital and operational efficiency flows from infrastructure readiness and technology that facilitates innovation, integrity and integration.

This pace and scope of change highlight the need for platform technology that is more flexible, resilient, scalable and built for the future. Market operators need to be agile, intelligent and decisive with data.

Yet the requirements of modern infrastructure not only place new demands on operators but also shift the playing field beneath them.

That is, historically, operators have utilized scheduled downtime for upgrades, security patches and batched processes. However, as continuous trading hours become the expectation and instantaneous settlement facilitated by tokenization grows nearer, these windows are compressing.

The next generation of always-on capital markets is taking shape, highlighting these considerations for operators:

• The expanding scope of "mission-critical.” Once an exclusive term for the absolute most critical technology (e.g., matching engine) it now reasonably encompasses any workflow facilitating real-time decision-making, interoperability and resilience. As a broader range of systems and capabilities now fall within mission-critical scope, they also become priorities to invest in and evolve. This complex balancing act highlights the need for systems capable of streamlining upgrades and maintenance with little to no downtime available.
• The design of future-proofed infrastructure. Legacy environments were largely designed for batch processing and distinct downtime periods, leading to obvious challenges in supporting the velocity of technology-driven changes required by continuous markets. Forward-looking solutions are increasingly architected to align with modern business priorities that prioritize constant availability, resilience, scaling and the dynamic application of updates and upgrades.
• The interconnectedness of markets. Robust interoperability is the guiding principle of modern markets, where a deeply engaged ecosystem is a requisite to continuous availability. While many contemporary systems are integrated, real interoperability generally requires seamless, persistent communication that functions with minimal disruption. This level of robustness—where systems are not merely connected but deeply resilient—is important, as shrinking maintenance windows limit the opportunity for manual remediation. Operators must not only connect but also collaborate to maximize. Continuous, end-to-end processing is very much like a chain fence: its structure being only as strong as its links. Identifying and solving dependencies will be essential to baselining this new operational model.
• The growth of digital assets. Traded digital assets volumes are growing and firms are increasingly ramping up to utilize collateral tokenization. The opportunities presented by these innovations are clear but so are the realities of implementation. As digital assets drive change, it will be critical to unite the dimensions of traditional and decentralized finance to support growth and optimization by focusing on platform performance and efficiency, market structure plumbing and the refinement of collaboration and partnerships that help support innovation, governance and adoption. These will be the key building blocks to institutionalization of digital assets and the realization of their benefits at scale. Over 2026, an important space to watch is this under-the-hood facilitation of digital assets and how infrastructures respond to support it in a holistic way.

Cloud has long been an industry trend. As 2026 begins, it enters a new phase of adoption marked by more mature and sophisticated models: i.e., managed services. Adopting managed services in a platform strategy enables organizations to concentrate on innovation and growth by letting a trusted provider handle system complexity and dependencies.

This approach capitalizes on the efficiency and scale opportunities that market operators would otherwise have to invest heavily in to capture. Undifferentiated heavy lifting of infrastructure and maintenance requires substantial resources that could be funneled into core competencies and revenue generation. The upside may be marginal: more control but more costs, dependencies and risks. 

By entrusting a provider to handle the undifferentiated heavy lifting of day-to-day management, operators can focus on their core competencies and service innovation instead of acquiring and retaining top technologist talent or pursuing widescale upskilling that would take time to realize while technology moves at a rapid pace outside the organization. This approach helps mitigate the risks associated with technological lock-in and ensures platforms remain capable of integrating emerging capabilities, such as AI agents, and connecting efficiently to global markets.

Resilience is also part of this equation. Strategies involving with multi-region deployments are increasingly standard for ensuring continuity during outages. This resilience extends beyond redundancy and toward designing for systemic stability in a global market landscape where resilience can be best achieved in collaboration with the wider ecosystem. Such robust, all-around cloud approaches have been validated amid recent events, with Nasdaq able to maintain availability of its markets and services amid wider outages that have increased the scrutiny on the risks of single-region strategies. 
 

Advances in artificial intelligence are taking market operations beyond algorithmic uses and toward predictive and highly automated capabilities that enable real-time surveillance, risk modeling and decision support at scale and speed.

The next thing to watch in the AI space for 2026 is the growth of agentic AI. These tools are expected to further enhance productivity and automate workflow orchestration while also offering deeper and more relevant insights on demand. An agentic AI workbench that facilitates the linking of open and custom agent models is becoming a new ideal. With the right contexts and considerations in place, humans in the loop can elevate their activities and interventions.

AI is also quickly becoming a baseline expectation from market participants, who are largely more advanced and nimbler in their adoption of AI.

For market providers, this requires infrastructure that is not only cloud-native but architected for deterministic processing and high-volume data integrity—the real driver of AI success. As the industry prepares for the adoption of agentic AI and automated decision-making, trust in data remains the foundation of operation. To drive true organizational transformation, AI strategies must be closely aligned with overarching business objectives and an integrated vision. Without this alignment, technology investments risk creating fragmented systems and diluted innovation rather than delivering scalable long-term value.
 

Market infrastructure providers are navigating a defining shift in the evolution of financial markets. While the transition from scheduled downtime to continuous availability represents a significant strategic opportunity, infrastructure challenges must be addressed.

As infrastructure providers embark on a consequential 2026, here are the four cornerstones underpinning strategy:

• Modernization: Reflect the expanded mission-critical scope in system architecture designed for always-on, real-time operations.
• Resilience: Implementing managed services to gain innovation on-ramp with minimal disruption.
• Interoperability: Facilitate integration and seamless connectivity across platforms to support automated workflows and risk management as TradFi and DeFi world merge and paths are paved for institutional adoption.
• AI and data integrity: Build trusted data frameworks and scalable environments to support AI-driven automation and predictive analytics.

At the intersection of these trends is the Nasdaq Eqlipse suite for trading and post-trade infrastructures. Cloud-enabled, module and modernized, Nasdaq Eqlipse is helping exchanges, CCPs and CSDs gain performance, resilience and strategic enablers that help them optimize for always-on, AI-powered markets.

Learn more about Nasdaq Financial Technology and Eqlipse resources.
 

Discover How Nasdaq Financial Technology Empowers Over 3,800 Leading Finance Organizations

We are committed to helping market operators and participants overcome infrastructure, operational and regulatory challenges. Our solutions empower you to focus on your core competencies, driving market growth and progress.

Learn More