As market data suppliers multiply, competitive advantage is shifting away from proprietary platforms toward vendor-neutral interfaces. Here's why MCP, AI, and standardized data access could reshape the future of financial market infrastructure.

Replacing a legacy capital markets platform like Front Arena is costly, risky, and often unnecessary. By extending the core with a modern integration layer, banks can deliver real-time analytics, regulatory reporting, and digital client experiences while preserving the stability of their existing trading systems. The key is treating market data, reference data, and transaction data as distinct modernization challenges.

Europe's transition to T+1 settlement is far more than a one-day reduction in the settlement cycle. It is a fundamental transformation of market infrastructure, requiring greater automation, higher-quality data, and real-time post-trade operations across Europe's fragmented capital markets.

At AsiaFIC 2026, a recurring theme emerged across discussions on agentic AI, interoperability, governance, and cloud infrastructure: AI readiness is increasingly becoming an architecture challenge. As financial institutions move from AI experimentation to production deployment, fragmented market data, inconsistent operational contexts, and disconnected enterprise systems are creating new barriers to scale. The firms best positioned for AI success may not be those with access