Capital Markets 2026: What the SIFMA Fact Book Means for Fintech and Data Providers
Updated: 6 hours ago
Market shifts worth following beyond the headline data, into the workflows, constraints and operating consequences they create.
By Danielle Moore Jarnot, Founder, Moore Consulting
Former buy-side trader and technical analyst with experience across institutional trading, market structure, sales, strategy and enablement.
Key takeaways
The 2026 SIFMA Capital Markets Fact Book provides useful context on where activity increased and market structure changed. The more important question for fintech and data providers is what those changes mean inside institutional workflows.
Treasury central clearing combines significant market scale, mandated post-trade change and hard implementation deadlines. The signal is concentrated in onboarding, integration, collateral and exception-management friction.
Amended Rule 605 creates a different set of pressures around data capture, classification, timestamping, execution-quality analysis, reconciliation and reporting.
Across both examples, the useful analytical chain is the same: observed change → affected workflow → operational or economic consequence → accountable buyer → buying evidence → provider fit
The 2026 SIFMA Capital Markets Fact Book is full of headline numbers: record equity trading volume, Treasury activity above $1 trillion a day and continued change across U.S. market structure.
Those figures describe what happened in the market. In my work with client-facing teams at data and fintech providers, I look at what those changes mean inside the firms operating in that market, and what that means for their workflows.
Treasury volume means something very different to a clearing technology provider than it does to an analytics platform. Changes in equity-market reporting requirements affect execution analytics, market data, trading infrastructure and data platforms differently. The implications change again depending on whether the institution is a dealer, traditional asset manager or hedge fund.
The question I come back to is:
Whose workflow changed, what became harder or more expensive, and what evidence inside the institution shows that the change is creating a meaningful constraint?
From market change to operating impact: a 6-step chain
This approach separates market context from operating impact. A public statistic may indicate where to look, but the next step is understanding the work behind it: what changed in the process, where additional complexity entered the operating model, which function absorbs the consequence and whether the institution is experiencing enough friction to warrant attention.
For example, Treasury central clearing and amended Rule 605 illustrate 2 different paths from market change to operating impact:
Treasury clearing combines market scale with a mandated change to the post-trade model and implementation deadlines.
Rule 605 shows how an execution-reporting change can create data and reconciliation requirements that stay hidden behind trading volume.
1. Treasury central clearing in 2026: follow the implementation friction
What changed in the market
U.S. Treasury trading averaged roughly $1.06 trillion a day in 2025, up 15.3%, according to SIFMA. That scale has continued into 2026, with average daily Treasury trading remaining above $1 trillion.
Volume provides the context. The more consequential development is the combination of that scale with a mandated change to the post-trade model and fixed implementation dates. The SEC's Treasury clearing requirements apply to eligible cash-market transactions beginning December 31, 2026, followed by eligible repo transactions on June 30, 2027.
What changed in the work
Depending on their role in the market, firms need to establish the appropriate direct or indirect clearing access model, determine transaction eligibility, complete account and sponsor onboarding, connect clearing workflows, manage margin and collateral, reconcile clearing and settlement records and handle exceptions.
For dealers providing client clearing, that can include scaling onboarding and operational capacity across customers. For hedge funds and other indirect participants, the work may include sponsor arrangements, documentation, collateral processes and integration with existing financing and operations workflows. The mandate therefore reaches well beyond clearing itself, touching operations, financing, collateral, legal documentation, technology, data and client onboarding.
Where the signal is concentrated
DTCC's July 2026 survey of FICC Government Securities Division Netting Members helps narrow where implementation work remains. Among respondents, 79% reported that the necessary FICC account setups were already in place, and nearly all firms requiring an account had either established one or entered the onboarding pipeline. Respondents also estimated $300 billion to $400 billion in average daily par value of Treasury cash activity still to be submitted for central clearing.
That remaining volume confirms that the transition is still underway which institutions are experiencing the greatest operating strain is a separate question. The stronger signal is the friction behind the transition: onboarding capacity, incomplete integration, collateral handling, testing exceptions or another workflow the current operating model is struggling to absorb efficiently.
Evidence to look for
Relevant indicators include:
An access model that's been selected but is still being integrated
Client or fund accounts still moving through onboarding
Testing that continues to produce operational exceptions
Collateral or margin processes that require significant manual intervention
Repo implementation materially behind cash-market readiness
Technology dependencies still awaiting testing or production rollout
Reconciliation or settlement processes requiring additional manual oversight
These are more informative than Treasury volume alone because they show where the market-structure change has entered day-to-day operations.
Likely accountable stakeholders
Ownership varies with the institution's role and operating model. At dealers, relevant functions may include clearing and post-trade operations, Treasury financing, client clearing leadership and the COO organization where onboarding capacity is a constraint. At indirect participants, operations, treasury, collateral management, financing and the team managing the clearing-provider relationship may each own part of the implementation.
Technology and data teams become increasingly important where the constraint sits in connectivity, integration, message flows, reconciliation or internal data architecture. The point is to identify where the operating consequence lands rather than assume that the regulatory change has a single owner.
Relevance by provider type
Post-trade, clearing and collateral providers should focus on onboarding throughput, collateral processes, exceptions, reconciliation and operating capacity.
Infrastructure and connectivity providers should look at the interfaces between execution, clearing, settlement and internal systems, including new connections, testing environments and message flows.
Market data and reference-data providers may become relevant where new clearing workflows require additional identifiers, normalized transaction data or stronger reconciliation across systems.
Analytics providers need a more specific connection. New margin, collateral, financing, liquidity or risk requirements may create analytical demands, and that demand has to be confirmed at the institution before the mandate becomes relevant.
Question to investigate
Where is Treasury clearing implementation still creating the most operational work as you move toward the December deadline?
2. Equity market structure and amended Rule 605: follow the data and reconciliation problem
What changed in the market
U.S. equity average daily volume reached a record 17.6 billion shares in 2025, up 44.6%, according to SIFMA. The composition of that activity is as important as the headline.
FINRA reports that average daily dollar volume in exchange-listed NMS stocks reached approximately $828 billion in 2025. Off-exchange trading exceeded on-exchange trading when measured by shares, while exchanges continued to account for most activity when measured by transactions and dollar volume.
Those measures describe different characteristics of the market. Share volume leaves open the economic value, security mix and execution characteristics of off-exchange activity. For firms analyzing execution and market structure, precision about population, venue and measurement methodology matters.
Amended SEC Rule 605 adds a more direct workflow change. Most of the amended requirements reached their compliance date on August 1, 2026, broadening the reporting population, expanding the orders captured by the rule, revising order-size and order-type categories, adding execution-quality measures, increasing timestamp precision and requiring public summary reports. The requirement to begin collecting information for price-improvement statistics relative to the best available displayed price follows in November 2026.
As of late August 2026, firms are collecting their first full month of data under the amended regime, with detailed and summary reports covering August due publicly by the end of September. That makes implementation and data readiness the immediate issue.
What changed in the work
Reporting entities need consistent order classification, sufficiently granular timestamps, appropriate quote and benchmark data, coverage of the expanded order population, reliable calculations and outputs that can be reproduced from source data.
For firms newly brought into the reporting population, the requirements may also create new demands on data capture, timestamp precision and synchronization, historical quote and benchmark data, storage, calculation logic, data lineage, quality assurance and reporting infrastructure.
The requirement reaches beyond producing a regulatory report. The underlying data needs to be consistent enough that the firm can explain how a reported result was produced and trace discrepancies back through the systems feeding it.
Where the signal is concentrated
The relevant signal appears in the gap between what the reporting regime requires the firm to reproduce and what its current data and systems can reproduce reliably. That gap will differ materially across institutions.
One firm may have largely automated the process. Another may still be reconciling regulatory results against internal TCA, correcting classifications manually or tracing inconsistencies through multiple upstream systems. The equity-volume statistic describes the market environment; the implementation work reveals where the operational pressure sits.
Evidence to look for
Relevant indicators include:
Manual QA or report-production cycles
Execution-quality calculations that are difficult to reproduce
Recurring reconciliation between internal analytics and regulatory reporting
Incomplete coverage of the expanded order population
Timestamp precision or synchronization gaps
Inconsistent venue-level comparisons
Upstream data-lineage problems
New capture, storage or reporting requirements straining existing infrastructure
Multiple teams producing different versions of the same execution metric
Likely accountable functions
Depending on the firm's structure, relevant functions may include market structure or electronic-trading leadership, TCA and execution analytics, trading technology, market data, compliance and regulatory reporting, and data engineering or architecture.
Where responsibility sits matters because the same Rule 605 workflow can expose very different problems. A calculation problem, data-quality problem and infrastructure problem may surface in the same reporting process while requiring different expertise, ownership and technology responses.
Relevance by provider type
Execution-analytics providers should look at calculation, benchmarking, comparison and reporting workflows.
Market-data providers become relevant where quote history, venue coverage, normalization or benchmark data contributes to the issue.
Data platforms should focus on lineage, storage, reproducibility and the ability to trace reported results back to source data.
Trading-infrastructure providers may find relevance in data capture, timestamping, synchronization and system performance.
Trading-technology providers can use Rule 605 implementation to examine the underlying execution workflow, while requiring separate evidence before concluding that the execution platform itself is the constraint.
Question to investigate
As firms begin collecting data under the amended Rule 605 requirements, where are classification, data or execution-quality calculations still requiring manual reconciliation?
What else in the SIFMA Fact Book 2026 is worth following
Treasury clearing and Rule 605 are two examples of a broader pattern in the 2026 Fact Book. Other changes warrant the same workflow-level analysis, but through different operating lenses.
ETF proliferation, for example, raises questions about the marginal operating complexity of another product across reference-data setup, basket workflows, valuation, corporate actions, fund accounting, compliance and exception management. Broker-dealer and investment-adviser overlap raises a different question: how legal-entity structure affects data ownership, controls, supervision and responsibility for technology decisions across a financial-services organization.
Taken together, these shifts show why the headline data is only the starting point. The more useful analysis follows the change into the operating environment: which workflows are affected, where new constraints emerge, who absorbs the consequence and what evidence shows that the impact is material.
For fintech and data providers, that is where the SIFMA Fact Book becomes most useful: as a lens into how institutional workflows are changing, and where data, technology and operating models may need to change with them.
Sources and methodology
Market statistics are drawn from the SIFMA 2026 Capital Markets Fact Book. Regulatory and market-structure claims were independently verified against SEC, FINRA and DTCC/FICC primary sources.
Moore Consulting advises fintech, data, and infrastructure companies selling into financial services on GTM strategy, positioning and sales execution.
Moore Insights examines how revenue teams translate strategy into execution as complexity scales.
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