Citi Securities Services Evolution 2025

Securities Services Evolution 2025 | 35 DLT and digital assets: what a difference a year makes Alongside T+1, the speed and scale of DLT and digital asset adoption by firms in North America is the major headline for 2025. Digital asset growth in this region outpaces the rest of the world today, thanks largely to the SEC’s 33 “Crypto Task Force” (launched in January 2025 to build a rational regulatory framework) and the GENIUS Act 34 (enacted in July 2025 to provide essential regulatory clarity on the status of stablecoins). Against this backdrop, blockchain initiatives have continued to dominate American headlines throughout 2025 - BlackRock’s BUIDL fund and its peers at Fidelity, Wellington, Franklin Templeton and Wisdom Tree are legitimizing real- world asset tokenization by accumulating over USD4 billion in AUM since launch. Meanwhile, Circle’s USDC 35 continues to prove itself as a stable, compliant and widely adopted digital currency. And the DTCC’s “Great collateral experiment 36 ” is providing a clear statement of intent on the future direction of the US markets. With 86% of North American respondents blocked by concerns around regulatory clarity (on digital money especially), this new regulatory momentum is quickly unlocking new flows and helping to solidify the foundations for a new digital asset ecosystem. Not surprisingly, this momentum is driving expectations ever higher. North American respondents to our survey are now the most bullish of any region on their expectations of tokenization, expecting 14% of turnover to be conducted using tokenized or digital securities (versus a global benchmark of 9%) (Figure 10). Equally, 85% of North American respondents expect DLT to have a notable impact by 2030 (up from 80% in 2024 and 75% in 2023). Expectations of cryptocurrency growth are also increasingly evident, with 18% of North American respondents expecting cryptocurrencies to be the fastest growing asset class by 2030. As banks and investors (notably high-frequency trading houses) swell their cryptocurrency investments, they are driving a rapid increase in the sophistication of product offerings (to include financing and balance sheet management), well beyond retail custody accounts. FMI platform transition: all change With T+1 and the growing use of DLT and digital assets creating pressures across the trade cycle for all levels of participant (not to mention 24/5 clearing and asset servicing pressures), North America’s markets are undergoing significant levels of change in 2025. But with many of the FMI platforms that support North America’s markets undergoing major transitions in 2025 (including the Canadian Depository for Securities (CDS), DTCC, OCC 37 and others), the market is having to innovate and modernize simultaneously – creating opportunities for growth and for disturbance at the same time. In Canada, CDS, completed their major Post Trade Modernization 38 (PTM) initiative in May 2025 replacing legacy clearing and settlement systems with a new, more resilient platform. Since then, the platform has begun delivering new benefits in collateral management (notably integrating with the Canadian Collateral Management Service, or CCMS) and in corporate action automation. Similarly, DTCC 39 is investing heavily in platform modernization to increase resilience (leveraging cloud and AI), to improve process efficiency in settlements 40 and corporate actions; to enable new services such as expanded US Treasury clearing, 24/7 equities clearing; and to build the foundational components for a digital asset ecosystem. Across this huge scope, DTCC is helping to restructure the American financial markets at rapid pace.