Citi Securities Services Evolution 2025

40 | Securities Services Evolution 2025 Digital Assets: moving beyond sponsorship But T+1 is not the only thing on the operating agenda for European firms. The adoption of digital assets has risen significantly in importance over the last year with 22% of European respondents ranking it as most impactful in 2025, up from 13% in 2024. (Figure 21) This accelerating momentum is thanks to significant efforts across the public and private sectors in 2025, to turn ambition into reality. The efforts of the ECB and their Eurosystem DLT trials 59 program (which ran fromMay to November 2024) has been fundamental. Unique in scale and breadth, these highly successful trials involved 64 participants, over 200 transactions, several sovereign bond issuances and €1.59 billion settled in real cash. Far from being experiments, these trials provided firms with the ability to manage live cash transactions using a variety of mechanisms and helped participant firms to make significant progress in legal and technical readiness for digital assets. Building on this momentum, the ECB announced a “dual-track” strategy in July 2025. 60 Pontes , the short-term solution, will link DLT platforms directly with the Eurosystem’s TARGET Services for efficient settlement (using a “trigger mechanism”); whilst Appia, the long-term vision, will support the exploration of on-chain digital money in a DLT-native ecosystem. Meanwhile, the UK government has launched a pilot program exploring the use of DLT for issuing and transactive sovereign debt (gilts) in a wide range of use cases. Operating within the Bank of England’s Digital Securities Sandbox, 61 the Digital Gilt Instrument 62 (DIGIT), will provide the basis for more, industry-led development and adoption, under the essential leadership of the Central Bank. But there is more than just digital experimentation going on. Fnality is now live as a regulated payments system at the Bank of England; Switzerland’s SDX is now tokenizing late-stage pre-IPO equities for institutional and eligible investors (in cooperation with Citi); HQLAx and Eurex have announced their own plans to manage tokenized securities as collateral; and firms such as Calastone and Euroclear ’s Iznes are tokenizing fund subscriptions and redemptions across the region’s leading domiciles. These combined efforts doubtless explain the growth in perceived impact of DLT and digital assets amongst European respondents. With such strong commercial drivers, it is perhaps not surprising that more Europeans (27%) expect DLT to significantly drive their new product revenues than those in any other region. Asset Servicing: not all standards drive progress Driven by discussions around regionalization and consolidation, asset servicing automation and standardization has been an established topic in the region since the inception of T2S and the implementation of SRD II. Whilst this year has seen the live implementation of the European Collateral Management System (in June 2025), the SCoRE standards that support it have been the subject of much discussion – running in parallel as they do with other market standards such as the Corporate Events Joint Working Group (CEJWG) in addition to prescribed ISO 20022 messaging standards in the European Union. With some scope questions still unanswered, the benefits of this development may take several years to become clear pending greater alignment of the multiple standards that are already in place. In the meantime, the regions FMIs are stepping up to support automation. Euronext through its CA4U 63 (Corporate Actions For You) project , and Euroclear are both seeking to harmonize and consolidate corporate action processes across their CSD networks, aligning with key industry standards, such as the ECB SCoRE standards using ISO20022 messaging. With both operating a number of CSDs across Europe, this development looks set to reduce fragmentation by eliminating country-specific systems – itself a critical step forward for all profiles of market participant .