Capital Markets Operational Agility More Important Than Scale in 2026
New Exegy research shows that the convergence of expansion across asset classes, geographies, and trading hours is costing firms their competitive edge
New York, Chicago, London — August 18th, 2026 — New research from Exegy, a leading provider of market data, trading technology, and managed services for the capital markets, examines how, as global markets expand across asset classes, geographies, and trading hours simultaneously, market participants are facing competitive constraints in the form of an infrastructure tax. Technical debt already consumes an estimated 21 – 40% of enterprise IT budgets, according to Deloitte, adding to the operational burden firms face as market access expands.
With capital markets entering an era defined by increasingly fragmented market data and continuous trading sessions, trading firms are faced with the need to scale access without increasing their operational burden. Exegy’s new whitepaper “The Infrastructure Tax of Total Market Access” examines the operational complexity, infrastructure overhead, and integration debt of an “Everything, Everywhere, All at Once” environment.
Key findings include:
- The Overnight Trading Gap: Overnight U.S. equity volumes regularly exceed 600 million shares during volatility events, and MOON ATS surged 200% in notional activity between late 2025 and early 2026, yet no regulatory structure exists, meaning firms that do not have access to an OBBO are struggling with fragmented data.
- Expanding Global Markets: Growth across markets including MENA, APAC, and LATAM is creating new opportunities for institutional firms, while also adding new connectivity, data, normalization, and infrastructure requirements.
- Regulatory Consolidation: With the EuroCTP tape being imminent and the UK tape newly launched, firms still managing bespoke, in-house normalization stacks face simultaneous migration projects.
- Asset Class Boundaries: Digital assets are increasingly intersecting with traditional capital markets, as institutional initiatives from firms including DTCC, Nasdaq, and ICE bring tokenization and digital market infrastructure closer to established financial workflows.
David Taylor, CEO of Exegy, said: “With the adoption of 24/5 trading, tokenization and digital assets, increasing interest in emerging markets, and liquidity distributed across hundreds of venues, trading infrastructure can easily become the limiting factor for many firms. We are entering an era in which firms that are agile and can move faster to market have the competitive advantage. The challenge is building an infrastructure strategy that can scale with new opportunities without requiring the same level of investment and complexity every time the market shifts.”
The whitepaper explores these trends one by one, showing that firms running in-house infrastructure are now facing increasing costs due to a need for connecting to a consolidating market from fragmented infrastructure. On the other hand, those using specialist vendor products will be able to focus on agility instead of focusing on maintenance and development.
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About Exegy Inc.
Exegy provides high-performance market data and trading infrastructure for the world’s most demanding capital markets firms. Our platforms help clients process, normalize, distribute, and act on real-time data with deterministic performance as volumes, volatility, and complexity rise. Drawing on software, FPGA acceleration, and managed services expertise, Exegy supports the full spectrum of latency needs—from ultralow-latency strategies to broad cross-asset workflows—on a unified stack. Recent deployments have delivered efficiency gains, including server-footprint reductions of up to 47%, while preserving performance under peak load. We partner closely with quantitative trading firms, brokerages, and global banks to deliver reliability, scalability, and operational simplicity.
For more information, visit exegy.com.
