Culture Shifts: Why the Industry Is Already Moving Beyond T+1

Most of my career I have worked for the banks themselves, and at Smartstream I am now on the other side of the fence. What I see is very different corporate cultures, and that really influences the readiness of banks. At a round table earlier this year with senior IT managers from different banks, they reiterated what I always see: some banks are very cautious and prefer to wait and see, and some want to be pioneers at the front edge of everything.

For readiness for things like T+1 and instant payments, and for market developments such as tokenisation, which is really picking up pace, it comes down to the corporate culture of the bank and also its priorities. Even this morning I have been talking about a major tier one bank and what funding it has for its different initiatives. While T+1 may be important, some banks are saying they have other things more important on their agenda.

You can compare it to ISO 20022. Some banks have been there for a while, and other banks are still trying to get themselves sorted. It very much comes down to the bank itself.

The answer has been the same for a long time: it is always about data and the accuracy of data. Wherever you are in the post-trade process, you can usually boil it down to exactly the same things. Studies are published regularly, and the numbers are always roughly the same. Exceptions cause the noise and a lot of the manual effort within a bank, and typically around 70% of exceptions, give or take a few percentage points, go back to the underlying data.

For intraday liquidity management, the risk exposure when firms do not get it right is enormous, in terms of financial, operational and reputational risk. It is all about getting the data right at the very beginning, and that comes down to the organisation. Some organisations are very strong at modernising their technology stack, but a lot of banks are still working with legacy data technology stacks. They quite often hit roadblocks in their journey and have to do manual workarounds. That is where we start building use cases for things like agentic AI. But ultimately it is the same old story: it comes down to managing the data and having quality data, which helps you eliminate the risk around intraday liquidity challenges.

Whilst we talk about T+1, the industry is already moving past that. The move towards 23-by-5 trading will put even more pressure on timely action, and with tokenisation you can start moving tokenised assets in real time. If I am sitting in a bank, responsible in finance and with the regulator for making timely decisions, it is all about having the right technology in place.

A lot of banks today are still doing things in batches. There may be intraday batches, but you are still waiting on a schedule rather than capturing things as and when they happen in the market. One of our tier one banking customers, about two weeks ago, wanted to know the millisecond latency of particular activities. So some customers are already there and thinking about how to manage their risk profile. Other banks, because they are still working with legacy technology stacks and have other priorities, which we all understand, are basically doing risk acceptance. We see a diverse range of opinions: one bank asking me about millisecond latency, another still figuring out its schedules during the day for different batches.

T+1, instant payments and tokenisation are reaching banks at very different speeds. In this FinextraTV interview at Sibos 2026, Nick Smith, Chief Business Officer at Smartstream, explains that readiness comes down to corporate culture and internal priorities, from cautious waiters to banks that want to be pioneers.

For institutions modernising their payment operations, Smart Payments digital payments and exception handling addresses the operational side of that shift.

Roughly 70% of operational exceptions trace back to underlying data, according to Smith, which makes data quality the foundation of intraday liquidity management. Legacy technology stacks force manual workarounds, and those workarounds are where use cases for Smart Agents agentic AI for financial operations begin.

Firms managing funding and risk within the day can see how Smart Liquidity real-time intraday cash and liquidity management supports that work.

Smith notes that the industry is already moving past T+1, with 23-by-5 trading and tokenised assets pushing banks from scheduled batches towards real-time, millisecond-level decision-making. Watch the full interview above to hear how customers are approaching the shift.