Home Transaction Banking Beyond T+1: Rewiring Custody for the 24/7 Market
Author: Gilly Wright | Photos: Shutterstock
Faster settlement is forcing banks and treasurers to rethink liquidity, payments, and custody.
This article appears in the October issue of Global Finance Magazine.
The transition to compressed settlement cycles was initially framed as an operational hurdle. In reality, it exposed a fundamental flaw: markets trade 24/7, while legacy custody and payment rails remain shackled to traditional banking windows.
As settlement windows shrink, treasurers no longer have the luxury of multi-day batch reconciliations. Prefunding trades require real-time liquidity optimization to prevent settlement fails. “We are at an inflection point,” said Lim Soon Chong, group head of Global Transaction Services at DBS Bank Ltd. “Intermediaries are reassessing their strategies to capture the shift toward an ‘on-demand’ digital economy.”
Since 2021 , DBS has operationalized this through blockchain-powered token services, enabling real-time multicurrency liquidity and automated treasury actions. By integrating these services with custody and digital exchange services, DBS provides the infrastructure for a programmable, real-time financial ecosystem.
Custody transformation is being driven by integrating real-time processing with modular delivery. At the forefront is Citigroup Inc.’s Custody+, a platform designed for an always-on economy.
For Amit Agarwal, head of custody at Citi, the requirement is clear: “To deliver a frictionless, always-on market, cash and securities for fiat and digital assets must settle in real time, 24/7, supported by custody infrastructure that is equally always on.” This vision is operationalized through Citi’s patented Single Event Processing (SEP) technology. Agarwal noted that SEP’s value extends beyond efficiency. By compressing timelines for income events, corporate actions and tax processing, SEP provides clients with earlier liquidity. This transforms faster settlement from a back-office metric into a strategic advantage.
Chris Cox, head of investor services at Citi, added that clients are modernizing legacy models to address cost and regulatory pressures. Cox said the Custody+ ecosystem is the direct answer to these needs. “Customers fundamentally want simplification and improved outcomes,” Cox explained. “Custody+ is our response to addressing those needs—it’s about creating front-office benefits rather than just letting custody be about post-trade. We chose to disrupt our own custody model and bring together our suite of near- and real-time capabilities as a modular ecosystem.”
Yet, technological speed alone is insufficient. Anthony Yeung, chief commercial officer at CoinCover, argues that institutional confidence requires secure key management and transparent recovery. “The regulatory architecture must be matched by institutional-grade safeguards,” Yeung explained. “The real measure of success is whether the ecosystem is built with resilience and operational integrity at its core.”
While Citi’s modular approach serves as a blueprint, this evolution is triggering a cascading effect across the landscape. The move to 24/7 markets is being actively operationalized by major players stripping away the obsolescence of batch-driven infrastructure, fueled by the rise of 24/7 trading, the need for instantaneous collateral fluidity and the proliferation of tokenized real-world assets .
Global custodians are rede…