If there is a single lesson from three decades at the heart of repo, it is this: repo does not evolve through big-bang innovation. It evolves through the steady improvement of market plumbing including documentation, settlement, custody, clearing, data, and the operating model that connects them.
That is the backdrop for the panel discussion at the upcoming MarketAxess third annual Global Reimagine Repo conference in London. The session brings together practitioners who have experienced this evolution, at a moment when the market’s next phase is increasingly defined by a simple but demanding theme: speed, clarity, confidence.
Infrastructure-led growth still matters
Repo’s early constraints were often operational rather than economic. Fragmented collateral pools, inconsistent market practices across jurisdictions, and cross-border frictions in settlement and custody limited growth. As those frictions eased, the market shifted from asking “can we do this safely and reliably?” to “how efficiently can we do this at scale?”
This is one reason the International Capital Market Association (ICMA) European Repo and Collateral Council (ERCC) has been so influential. Market practice and standardisation are not peripheral in repo; they are the foundations of trust. ICMA’s own European repo market survey is widely cited as the most authoritative data point on the size and composition of the European market, precisely because the market is otherwise difficult to measure consistently.
The scale is material. ICMA’s 49th semi-annual survey reported €12.4 trillion of outstanding repo and reverse repo among survey participants as of 11 June 2025. Even allowing for survey coverage limitations, it underscores repo’s role as a structural financing channel rather than a niche product.
The US picture is similarly striking. New transaction-level datasets have started to reduce historical opacity. The US Treasury’s Office of Financial Research (OFR) reported that the US repo market averaged US$12.6 trillion in daily average exposures in Q3 2025, including large centrally cleared and triparty segments. Federal Reserve researchers have also highlighted the scale and the historical challenges of measuring it.
This matters because, when the market is this large, ‘reinvention’ cannot be a slogan — it must be an operational programme.
A broader ecosystem and higher expectations
Repo is no longer only a dealer-to-dealer market. It now spans buy side firms, central banks, debt management offices, central counterparties (CCPs), triparty agents, central securities depositories (CSDs) and international central securities depositories (ICSDs), and an expanding community of technology and data providers. That expansion has increased liquidity, but it has also raised the bar on transparency, predictability, and operational control.
This is why the conference theme resonates well beyond trading desks. For buy side and middle office teams, the question is often not whether repo can be executed, but whether it can be executed with confidence and managed with clarity across the lifecycle.
In the US, for example, data availability has improved. The Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA) publishes regular statistics on repo activity and rates, while the Federal Reserve Bank of New York provides detailed triparty repo data covering volumes, collateral types and haircut ranges. More data does not automatically create clarity, but it provides the raw materials for it.
Persistent friction inside firms
One of the most consistent themes in repo discussions is that institutional operating models have not always scaled at the same pace as the market itself.
Repo cuts across trading, treasury, risk, credit, collateral management, operations, and technology. That breadth is part of its strength, but it also creates ambiguity around ownership. Who is responsible for the end-to-end workflow and who funds the changes required to modernise it?
From a middle office perspective, this shows up as time spent reconciling exceptions, stitching together fragmented data, and managing lifecycle events under compressed deadlines. From a client relationship perspective, it shows up as the difficulty of getting consistent answers to basic questions: where is the collateral? What is the true exposure? What is the status of substitutions? Where are we vulnerable to fail? These are not ‘nice-to-have’ questions, they are the prerequisites for confidence.
This is why automation is increasingly framed not as a technology project but as a governance decision. The future state is not simply fewer spreadsheets. It is clearer accountability for how repo is run inside firms.
Speed as an operating discipline
Settlement acceleration has become one of the most important forcing functions for repo and securities financing markets globally.
In the US, the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC’s) move to T+1 with a completed transition on 28 May 2024 compressed post-trade timelines and increased the need for same-day allocations, confirmations, and operational readiness. In the UK, the Accelerated Settlement Taskforce (AST) recommended committing to T+1 by the end of 2027, and the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) referenced a target move to T+1 by 11 October 2027. In the EU, the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) has been explicit in supporting a move to T+1 and has outlined a governance structure involving the European Commission and the European Central Bank (ECB), alongside industry workstreams.
While repo itself is out of scope for mandatory T+1 settlement in the UK and Europe, the funding and collateral dependencies around it are not. With same-day funding and financing volumes expected to increase as cash markets move to T+1, operations teams face further compression of intraday timelines, effectively pulling confirmation, collateral mobilisation, and risk resolution decisions forward into trade date.
This is where practitioner voices are valuable. In a recent Securities Finance Times interview, Roy Zimmerhansl pointed directly to the operational intensity of accelerated settlement and its link to collateral optimisation and faster processing, themes that map cleanly to speed and clarity in repo workflows.
The practical takeaway is that speed is not a single initiative. It is an ecosystem effect: tighter cut-offs, extended operating hours, fewer manual steps, and better exception management. You cannot ‘announce’ speed. You build it.
Clarity as the differentiator
If speed is the pressure, clarity is the solution.
The next phase of repo reinvention is increasingly about real-time visibility across the lifecycle: trade capture, allocation, confirmation/matching, collateral selection, substitution, margining (where relevant), settlement, and reporting. Each of those steps can be automated in isolation, but clarity comes from connecting them into a coherent operating picture.
This is where market infrastructure and technology perspectives are particularly relevant. In his own Securities Finance Times interview, Gabriele Frediani emphasised the importance of building repo markets through practical infrastructure engagement, grounded in how collateral and liquidity move. That ‘infrastructure-first’ view is exactly what clarity requires: visibility that is operational, not just informational.
Clarity is also becoming more measurable. The Office of Financial Research’s (OFR’s) move toward transaction-based measurement is a step-change in transparency, including segmentation of centrally cleared and triparty activity. Even when datasets are imperfect, they reflect a broader direction: markets want evidence, not anecdotes.
Confidence through resilience and risk management
Repo confidence ultimately rests on the ability to manage risk through stress, market risk, liquidity risk, operational risk, and counterparty risk.
Central clearing plays a growing role in both Europe and the US. It improves netting efficiency and reduces bilateral exposures, but it also concentrates risk management in the CCP model, making CCP resilience and margining frameworks central to market confidence.
Recent commentary from London Clearing House (LCH) underscores the growing demand for cleared repo and the role of clearing solutions in navigating fragmented landscapes and managing risk more efficiently, a theme Nick Barnes has discussed through LCH and London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG) channels. James Upton has also written about repo clearing as a lever for resource efficiency, liquidity access, and cost reduction. Providing a perspective that resonates with both buy side participants and balance sheet constrained dealers.
In the US, sponsored clearing has been a critical bridge between dealer-to-client activity and central clearing. Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) data and New York Fed analysis show how sponsored models have expanded access while reshaping cost and risk dynamics.
Confidence also has a policy dimension. In remarks prepared for a European Repo and Collateral Council (ERCC) gathering, Godfried De Vidts, senior advisor, ERCC, ICMA, reflected on repo’s ability to keep markets functioning through periods of turbulence, a reminder that repo is not simply a financing tool but a stabilising mechanism when markets are stressed.
The next chapter
It is tempting to frame the future of repo as a race toward tokenisation or 24/7 markets. In practice, repo’s next decade is more likely to be defined by quieter but more impactful changes: automation of exception workflows, richer intraday data, better interoperability between platforms and post-trade infrastructure, and operating models built for compressed timelines.
From a buy side perspective, the goal is not to become repo specialists. It is to use repo as a reliable, scalable, and operationally predictable tool that integrates cleanly with portfolio and liquidity management. In that context, ‘clarity’ is not marketing language. It is the core requirement for broader and safer participation.
Speed, clarity, confidence as a single operating goal.
The three words in this year’s theme work because they reinforce each other:
• Speed without clarity creates operational risk.
• Clarity without speed becomes a reporting exercise.
• Confidence is what you get when speed and clarity are embedded end-to-end.
Repo has been reinventing itself for decades through standards, settlement, and custody improvements, clearing innovation and a steadily broader ecosystem of participants. The next phase is not about turning repo into something else. It is about making repo run the way the modern market needs it to run: faster, more transparent, and more resilient.
That is what makes a 30-year panel relevant rather than nostalgic. It is not a history lesson. It is a map: how the market learnt to scale and what those lessons imply for the next decade of change.
Because repo is not reinvented by speeches, it is reinvented by the plumbing.
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