Executive Insights: Modernization, Market Trends, and the Future of Operations

SIFMA President and CEO, Kenneth E. Bentsen Jr., sits down with Bob Santella, CEO of BetaNXT to explore the themes shaping global markets and the future of operations with CEOs from major service providers and discussed the current market landscape, key modernization efforts, and top priorities for their firms and clients alike. Timothy C. Gokey, CEO of Broadridge and Frank La Salla, President and CEO of DTCC were also part of this main-stage roundtable discussion at the 2025 Operations Conference & Exhibition.

Kenneth E. Bentsen Jr.

Well, thank you all for being here. Thank you all, also, for your support of SIFMA over the years. We really appreciate it. It'd be hard to say we have more heavy infrastructure of the industry sitting on one panel than having the three of you all with us today. So this is going to be great. I want to start out, I was talking about the recent volatility that was going on. I think it'd be great to hear all three of you talk about, you know, and maybe, Tim, we'll start with you. How would you describe the current market environment, you know, and, you know, how these drivers are impacting your firm, your clients, and are there themes you're seeing emerge from this and is volatility here to stay? So a lot loaded in that question, but…

Timothy C. Gokey

Yeah, well, thank you, first of all, thank you for having us. And I think, you know, we're sort of, you know, right at the, you know, middle between wealth management, capital markets, asset management, and, you know, see all of that. I think the thing that we are, you know, I would try to distinguish is sort of what are the big things that are going on in the industry that are long term and then the volatility you just talked about. And I think a lot of the challenge that many of us in this room are balancing is how do we keep moving forward on the big things while addressing the near term? And I think four big things that are happening is you have this ongoing product proliferation, and you can see how that interacts with volatility. But you have, you know, all the way to sweep from decimalization to ETFs to managed accounts. But right now, we're seeing sort of the next generation of that real growth of direct indexing and massive influx of privates and this barbell with investors of passive investments for market exposure and private investments for alpha and all the ramifications of that. And that's, you know, you can see how that interacts with the volatility. And that leads directly to the whole transformation of wealth management, the role of advisors completely changing, the need for client interactions completely changing, and then bringing all that to the back office and all of us as we think about, you know, private assets at scale. And so, you know, that's a big transformation. You have this, the volumes we've seen in the capital market side over the past month just show the increasing need for scale across asset classes, across geographies, and that's creating the need for front to back platforms, the need for multi-asset class global platforms, and then AI on top of all of that, which creates harmonized data. So you have these big things we're all working on, and then you have the near-term volatility and it's sort of how do you use the present crisis to advance the bigger agenda? And I think that's what many of us are thinking about.

Kenneth

Frank, you're, you know, maybe nobody sees volumes as much as you do, but you know, how are you all seeing things at DTCC?

Frank La Salla

No, I think, you know, I think Tim touched on a couple of important things. I'll come at it just a little bit differently. I do personally think volatility is here to stay and I think there are some major macroeconomic trends that are going on that I don't think any of us could ignore. So a couple of things. One is, you know, if you look at the public markets versus the private markets, relatively speaking, the public markets are shrinking and we've got this confluence of new products. So think about same-day options, for example, think about the growth in ETFs. And you've got an enormous amount of liquidity. World economies grow, wealth grows, more liquidity has to go after opportunities to invest to keep it working, right? And I do think that coupled with the change in regulations, you mentioned Ken, in your opening remarks about treasury querying, we just got past T+1. That's just the tip of the iceberg. You've got an enormous amount of capital liquidity coming into the public markets and, unless those markets continue to grow, you're going to continue to see swings. And I don't think it's a bad thing, I just think it's where we are right now, given the confluence of issues regulatory, geopolitical, macroeconomic that I know we're going to touch on a little bit later. And so you've got incredible volume. You talk about the data that we see. In GSD FICC, where we net all the US treasuries, we hit on April 9th, as many of you remember that April 9th day was a bad day, right? Interest rates backed up, the equity market was selling off, things did not look well that day. I will tell you a couple of things. One is, from our vantage point, the capital markets are operating very efficiently. It wasn't like the meme stocks. We had a lot of responsiveness from the industry, margin calls were met, we really didn't have any major concerns over those past few weeks and I think it culminated on April 9th. What I would share with you about FICC and GSD, we hit a record day of $11.4 trillion on April 9th. That's up 122% from September of '22, when the treasury mandate was first announced. So, now, that really is a function of more treasury issuance, more volatility. I mean, when I started in the industry many years ago, you moved 1/32 on a treasury bond, that was a big move. We are moving 10, 15, 20 basis points on the long end of the curve any day, any day. I think that's going to continue. And even in NSCC where we settle, you know, equities and corporate debt, on that same day, on April 9th, we had five and a half trillion dollars netting through NSCC. So those are just a few data points just to give you a sense of how much volume is going through. And, like I said, as liquidity increases, the global growth increases. You can have activity come off, leave the US capital markets, but it's still going to be a lot of capital liquidity swashing around that's going to move the markets for quite a while.

Kenneth

So, Bob, I was reading your quarterly newsletter that you launched and, you know, your BetaNXT is in tens of millions of advisors, you know, supporting tens of millions of advisors and, you know, the amount of volume. How are you seeing things from your vantage point?

Bob Santella

Look, one of the things, one of the advantages, Ken, of going third here is I agree with everything that Tim and Frank said. I would say that, you know, advisors, they're touching the end client. So they're on the front lines of a lot of the angst and uncertainty we've seen in these volatile times. And so we're seeing with our customers, I think we're seeing the marketplaces, not just volatility, but unpredictability. The markets are volatile and we've had volatile markets since the markets have been open. However, my own view and a lot of our clients' view is that we probably have the most unorthodox and unique administration today that we've had in modern history, right? Depending on your political stripes, you can, you know, you can make your own conclusions, but what that means is that clients and financial advisors, they need to be much more proactive, they have to deal with a client base that maybe didn't experience this type of market during their investment horizon. That's where, bounce some of Frank's comments, multiple products, new products, non-correlated products to the traditional 60-40 allocation model and other things are really important.

Getting data to clients and the ultimate end user, the investor, quicker and better format in either real time or near real time is uber important for our clients and, really, investor community. And I would say when you have unpredictability, it makes it that much more difficult to make investment decisions. You know, you're normally making investment decisions for a two, three, five year horizon when we deal with something unpredictable. So when you're talking about dealing with the investor community, financial advisory, they have to navigate, along with the firms that sponsor them, this maze of how do we invest for short term and what does long-term investing mean right now?

And the last thing I'll say, yes, the question, is volatility here to stay? I've traded for a long time, been involved in the markets. I don't know if it's here to stay forever, but it's probably here to stay for the next three years, and so I think we need to make sure we manage that and understand there's good volatility, there's bad volatility. But the markets today are much more resilient. Talk about how we handle the volumes that we have today. It wasn't even a whisper of any problems in the markets how they were handled in April. That would not have been the case probably 10 or 15 years ago.

Kenneth

Yeah, no, I mean it was, back to that April 9th period, I was calling the Steve Byron saying, is anybody calling, saying anything? 'Cause you know, it seems like, I mean, this reminded me of March 2020. And there was a lot of stuff going on back then and it's just amazing how well it's worked. But in terms of all of this, I mean, what are you hearing from your clients? What are they, you know, and, Bob, you were talking about, you know, the end user of your clients, the investor, but, you know, the intermediaries who are your clients, what are you hearing from them with all of this that's going on?

Bob Santella

So first of all, we're here, there's a huge emphasis, not surprising, on stability. Clients that we serve, the largest financial advisory firms out there, stability is always important. They need systems that work, that work 100% of the time. New technology has been proven to work better than old technology. Should be common sense, but not always. We found that in the early parts of the pandemic, when all of a sudden new technology served a rapid move to working remote and other tools that were needed. So our clients are saying, "We need tools and we need systems and improvements quicker than we ever have in the past. They need to be integrated more seamlessly than we've had in the past." And we have to make sure we have API-friendly, partnership-friendly type systems that come into play. And then, for the front-end client, what they're saying is, "We need to get information in a more unified fashion." Talking about the public-private markets, that Frank mentioned, private investments, public investments, non-correlated investments, a single view, that's what they're asking for, a single view, single portfolio management system that gives them the risk and information that they can get in real time rather than the end of the day. That's what we're hearing from our clients.

Frank

Yeah and Ken, I think what Bob mentioned a couple minutes ago is critically important, given the context of volatility, larger volumes, uncertainty. Resiliency is the number one issue on clients' minds. So you talked a little bit about there was no whisper about any market infrastructure issues, which is great, and the market should take it for granted. That's our job to ensure, and that's a good thing. But the minute something goes wrong, everything changes. And I would add, what you talked about in terms of the volumes, we did that in a T1 environment, a T1 environment. So you have treasury settling same day or next day, now you got corporates, equities, bonds settling next day. We cut half the time out of the settlement pipeline and the industry was still able to do it. But to the paper I think that SIFMA issued not too long ago on resiliency, there is going to be a continued dialogue and it's going to ratchet up in terms of industry-wide resiliency in this market. Because the industry, everyone in this room knows this, the industry is just so interconnected. You get one major player who can't make a cutoff, drops a file, can't get their trades out, the knock-on effect to the industry is going to be tremendous. It's going to be tremendous. So I think you're going to see, one of the things we're going to, we talked about, you know, Bob's right. I know Tim spends a lot of time on new technology. How do we help innovate? I agree with you, new technology will reduce risk. Innovation can reduce risk when it's done responsibly and done the right way. And that will all come, that will all play a role in creating a new level of resiliency and recovery for the industry. That is top of mind for almost everybody that I know.

Kenneth

You know, a great question for our audience and sort of a great polling question will be, and I've talked to different industry executives is: did T1 actually, has that made us more, you know, added to our resiliency exponentially that we were able to handle, the industry was able to handle, that level of volume and volatility? And it kind of seems like it did. I mean, as much as you think you're tightening the screws a lot, that, you know, maybe that created more redundancies to make it work.

Timothy

And it's all the work leading up to T1 that made that happen as well. But it's interesting, you know, we're all service providers to all of you and when the question about what we're hearing, and, Bob, you went through your set of things and we're hearing exactly the same thing. It starts with resiliency. I say resiliency, roadmap and platform, I'd add to that, which is sort of how you solve that question of moving at scale, so.

Kenneth

The, Tim, you, I was watching an interview that you did with Baron's, I don't know when it was, but I was looking at it yesterday, but recently. So you talk about, and Bob would probably say the same thing, but you know, you all are both, you know, front office and back office now, in terms of that. So what are, you know, thinking again about what you're hearing from clients or, you know, what's your perspective on that in terms of the current volatility and all, from both the front office and the back office?

Timothy

Yeah, I think that taking this need for resilience as a base, the need for, not just what we're doing today, but how do we evolve that forward, and then underlying that, I'm going to say a theme of platform, which is, and we've been investing in this a lot over the past several years, but it's a solution to, is it new technology or old technology at the harmonization, the product proliferation, the, you know. 'Cause resilience also is, it's resilience for run, but there's resilience for change. And we all have the same data in many different systems, which then, you know, there's the reconciliation and getting that off track. There's the same functionality, again, in multiple places that when you have to change it, you have to change it multiple times and test it. And we can bring that together in a harmonized set of data with a harmonized set of APIs that is all running, it sort of is bringing west coast thinking to the arcana of what we do in financial services. And that's, it's a big in unlock that enables both change and resilience at the same time.

Kenneth

So, you know, I mentioned in my opening remarks that, you know, the new administration, new regulatory posture, still more to be filled in, you know, the regulators are just getting seated and all, but clearly a different approach, I think, than the prior administration with respect to regulation of the financial services sector. Having said that, we have an extensive rule book and no one thinks that rule book is going away. It may change. How are you thinking about the current regulatory landscape? How's that going to affect how you serve your clients?

Timothy

Yeah, I think for us, you know, first of all, I think the big things that the administration is focused on, trade, tariffs, cultural issues, immigration, are not directly impacting of our industry. So we're sort of at the second order, you know, the economy affects us, but we're sort of at the second order. With Paul Atkins now being in the seat at the SEC, look at his agenda. And, you know, when I see the intersection of that with the places that we play, there's sort of three tight intersections. One, you know, everyone's talking about digital assets. You know, there will be work both at the SEC and in Congress on digital assets. I think the angle on that that we take is around disclosure. When you think about how disclosure enables innovation, how, for instance, ETFs have grown explosively because they had good disclosure that was based on what mutual funds have, you know, what's the analogy of that for digital assets? And I know many people in this room have mixed views on the appropriateness of digital assets for retail investors, but the solution to that is not to ignore them. The solution is to bring them into the fold with financial advice to help people, you know, what roles do they play in the portfolio and how do you have that disclosed in a way that, you know, when things go wrong, as they definitely will, how do, you know, we as a firm stay safe? So the right disclosure there, a key thing. For us, shareholder engagement, you know, the sort of our side of things has always been very concerned about the power of the large passive asset managers and of the proxy advisory firms. And we're working on both those topics to help pass through voting, which went from eight funds to, two years ago, to 100 funds last year, to 400 funds this year. So it's becoming a real thing, as well as working with asset managers and large brokers on voting platforms that can be data driven to lessen the need for proxy advisory and digital communications, which, you know, I think we're all working on. How do we switch the default there? We've done a really good job of making communications more digital and 90% of regulatory communications are digital now. How do we switch that default, but without losing engagement of investors? And I think those are all, you know, those are sort of in our wheelhouse that are key topics.

Frank

Yeah, and I think, you know, I think on top, you know, just to add a little bit onto what Tim said, look, every administration has policy shift. I think we'll see, when Paul comes in, and I'm sure he'll be different than Jay Clayton was, than Gary Gensler was, and then you engage with the regulators and you listen to what they have to say, and you take that on board. But there are a number of things that aren't going to change. They're in flight, they will continue to be. Treasury clearing is one. Now we've got a delay for a year, but the industry is still moving toward it and that'll unfold as it is and that's fine, so we're going to stay focused on that. I think, it's hard to imagine that any of the regulators will take their foot off the gas on resiliency for the reasons we just all talked about. It just, it's not going to fall off of anybody's list, so we continue to drive down that path and engage on that. I think, I do think the interesting one is how, you know, to Tim's point, how does digital assets fall out in this? But, to me, what's more important is the use of blockchain. We can have a conversation about the pros and cons of cryptocurrency, et cetera, et cetera. But, when you marry up, at least at DTCC, when we marry up what we're hearing from our clients with what's coming down the pipe with new technology, there is a nice symbiotic relationship. One of the things we hear from our clients is, "How can you help us with liquidity? How can you help us with capital relief?" So we're doing things with SIFMA, for example, on treasury clearing and things to help provide relief, not by not introducing more risk, actually by reducing it, but providing liquidity. So if you think about it, if you can take a powerful technology like blockchain, and I've said, publicly, a number of times, blockchain is not going to upend the entire financial services ecosystem, but it will make that ecosystem better if it's used in the right way. Things like reducing batch processing, things like real time reconciliation. But the idea of mobilizing collateral more quickly, instantaneously, through atomic settlement, there is tremendous value in leveraging that, in leveraging that technology to help our clients with things like capital liquidity and margin requirements.

Bob

One thing I'll add to comments from Tim and Frank is that the markets don't like uncertainty, nor does a regulatory environment like uncertainty. And I think that, just like the markets have been resilient over many decades, our regulatory framework, I would say, independent of the political administration, has been somewhat resilient and somewhat predictable where it's going. This is the one timeframe I think where companies, firms, those that participate in the financial markets, they want better guidance and clearer guidance on what the policies are. No matter what they are, they want better guidance. And I think it's fair to say, getting back to my earlier statement of being unorthodox times that we live in, the lack of clarity, the lack of direction right now is an issue, is an issue. Is it a big issue? We'll find out. I think we have good regulators and I agree that the foundational regulations that we operate under, and it's also comes with monetary policies as well, which impacts the markets.

At this point in time, you know, entering this administration, we had a probably zenith as far as global interaction with financial markets, even regulators coordinating around the world. Some of the questions our clients have, and we should have as a collective industry leaders, is are there going to be permanent shifts in collaboration around the world, among regulators? Will that impact how we operate in the United States? I think conventional wisdom is correct that the level of regulation we're going to have in the markets for the next couple years is probably going to be less than we had in the previous administration. And we'll find out, we'll find out. But I think the more important thing is that is there going to be direct framework and clear policy so firms know how abide by these regulations? Again, 'cause it's back to how do you invest, how do you communicate to your investors, and so forth. I think we all embrace regulation as long as it's rational and it's clear and it's understandable to the public. And I think that's our biggest challenge right now.

Kenneth

So, Bob, I want to talk about, and all of you, about modernization, innovation, how that's working, advancements in technology. You know, it wouldn't be an industry conference if I didn't say AI 'cause, you know, we have to have AI and everything now, even though it may have always been here. But in particular, going back to your quarterly update that I was talking to you about earlier, you talked about how you all are thinking about AI with your clients and sort of, for all of you, you know, how are you, not just AI, but you know, technological innovation more generally, how are you seeing that with your clients?

Bob

Yeah, so the general theme is modernization and it means a lot of things to a lot of people. It's a very, in many ways, overused. But we think of modernization kind of being, in the simplest form, scalability, systems, and culture. In other words, are the core systems and architecture, foundationally, are they stronger than they used to be?

Scalability, can you grow and also converge opposite technology as part of that growth and be able to take in new asset classes like alternative assets, unified view on the front end, being able to seamlessly integrate partnerships? And then culture gets back to the fact that, again, that AI thing, we're still dealing with human beings right now. We're on stage, not robots just yet. And, again, to the culture, the skill sets, the people that operate these are important, specifically to AI.

At BetaNXT, we rolled out several key AI projects that are really having a huge impact. I think it's fair to say that early stages of the AI journey we're on, we've seen a lot of pickups in efficiency. But I think the value-added part now is starting to creep into the mid and front end of the clients that we serve. We're seeing predictive analytics that are adding real value to how people can analyze data, okay? We're actually seeing, in the investment, communication, and proxy world, automation is so key to how you collect data, it's literally exponentially more efficient than it was even three or four years ago. So I think there's not a firm out there of any size that's not looking at or making an investment in AI. That's going to continue, that's going to accelerate, And a key word is going to be pace. It's going to be a quicker pace with higher expectations and there's going to be winners and losers.

Frank

You know, at DTC, we're taking a pretty practical approach to AI. You know, we're using it very, you know, and I don't mean using Copilot, right? I mean, you know, we're ingesting a lot of our rules and regs into the system so it makes it easier for our members to actually access something, ask a question, get a quick response, as opposed to having to go through a number of different folks. We've sort of taken a, what I think of as a bottom up and top down approach in that we've got a little working group, not a little working group, it's actually a pretty big working group, but they're looking at how do we apply AI more practically to day-to-day running of the business and then we're obviously got a massive training exercise going through with all of our employees so that they're using AI responsibly. One of the things that we're very concerned about is making sure that anyone within the franchise, that has access to it and wants to use AI, should, it's an empowering technology, but it's got to be done in a very thoughtful, safe way. So we're investing a lot in what I think of as basic blocking and tackling. We're listening to the industry, watching what's going on. And, like most organizations, you know, I would say, we're feeling our way through it and using it where we think it makes sense and we'll continue to engage with the industry on how we best use it, if it helps with industry-wide initiatives.

Timothy

Yeah, I think, let me just touch briefly on AI and then the other sort of modernization trends. I think, for us, it's sort of incorporating AI into all of our products, it is looking at where we have unique information to productize, to have new products that we can sell, which we're actually having some good luck with, helping ourselves and our clients on the cost side, and doing all that in a safe way. And we're doing that through a common platform across all the everything we're doing so that we can have a common compliance layer, connect to all the large language models one time, and make that available to our product team so they can really do it at scale. And so I think that's working. And it raises, we talked about this modernization thing, the efficiency of doing that through platform. And I mentioned it earlier, but it is having a harmonized set of data is just exponentially more important in an AI world. And so harmonized data ontology, harmonized set of APIs, things that interact with one another, the way Bob said, you know, is going to be just a key part of the future. Two other things, just when you think about modernization, I want to build on what, Frank, you said about digital ledger technology. Tokenized securities, you know, it's going to be, as we think about faster and faster, we're seeing tokenized funds, you know, it's going to be coming and when we're here five years from now, it's going to be, you know, a different world in terms of the scale of that.

And we're already seeing it, you mentioned, helping on liquidity in capital. You know, as we get closer to treasury clearing, we're seeing, as you know, we're doing a lot of digital ledger repos and we're seeing the volumes there. We're over $100 billion a day, which, you know, when you look at the size of the crypto market, outside of Tether, you know, we're doing more repos today than the entire crypto market put together. So we're really seeing that begin to scale. So I think the whole tokenized securities is going to go. And then the last, I'd be completely remiss if I didn't talk about digitized communications one more time, but it's really, you know, when we just ruled out a whole new communication, regulatory communications for the tailored shareholder reports, and we're looking at how many clicks does it take across different firms in the room here for an investor to access, to actually see something? And it ranges from one to, with some very major firms, like, more than 15. And there's an exponential drop off at each of those. And so working with firms on how do you get people to see it, how do you bring the data upfront, how do you make it layered? You have exponential increases in investor engagement. And as we digitize, we always have to think about how we keep our end clients engaged.

Kenneth

I've got another question, were just talking about, particularly around tokenization. And, Frank, you and I have talked about this before, but, you know, I mean, we've been talking about blockchain now, for really a decade. And you know, I remember Greg Medcraft when he was the Australian Securities Commissioner and was the Chair of IOSCO was saying, you know, this is when we're talking T3 to T2, it's like, "Forget about T2, we're going T0," with, you know, blockchain and all. And he's not around, none of that's happened, but the pickup, I mean, everybody talked about the, "This is going to be great, everything's going to be tokenized." But the pickup seemed to be very slow across the industry. It seems to be moving pretty rapid or rapidly, the delta's getting greater right now. I mean, what do you attribute that, you think it just took the industry a while to think, "This is something we want to adopt?" Or is it all of a sudden this is, you know, "We want to start plowing ahead with this?"

Timothy

I think, you know, we acquire lots of smaller companies. This is, I'll come, and there are these things that someone started and new technology and we bring it in. But it's sort of, what you really see is every overnight success is 10 years in the making. Like, there's just a certain amount of bake time that it takes. And the fact there are lots of other things that started but went away because there wasn't sort of a there there. And I think, you know, DLT started with a big bang and then there were questions about whether there was a there there, but people kept on with it, and we're seeing the use cases emerge. And now when you overlay that with the volatility and uncertainty and the need for capital and all of those things, I think it is beginning to come together.

Bob

My two cents here is that, typically, Ken, as you know, the pace of change for anything that's meaningful is almost always slower than expected. I remember blockchain came out over a decade ago. Every big bank and every big broker had working groups looking at blockchain and how it's going to benefit their business. It was resilient, it was secure, it was stable, a foundational building block that was going to change the industry in many ways. It could help clearing process in particular, networking globally, and so forth. But then the reality steps in and if you go from conceptual to commercialization, you're dealing with legacy systems that take a long time to change, in many cases, particularly banking and brokerage systems that have been in place for a long time.

Newer entrant startups, they can incorporate new technology immediately if they want to. But I think what you're seeing with blockchain was probably the way, benefit of hindsight, the way it should have worked all along. Methodical, thoughtful approach. Same with tokenization and so forth. It's similar to how AI is today. Blockchain was so exciting 10 years ago. It's still around. I think we're finally starting to see real, commercial applications that are starting to have the benefits in industry.

Kenneth

Right, so let me ask on resilience, you know, what are the key insights that you would share in managing through unpredictable and potentially unprecedented conditions or events? Tim, you want to start?

Timothy

Yeah, I think it's important when we're talking resilience to break it down because there's resilience for run, which is really about edge cases and scalability. There's resilience for change, which is how do you continue to evolve? And those things can compete with each other. You can have a really stable legacy system, but you can't change it, you can have a really modern thing, but it's not scalable. And so getting those two things working together and then the cyber over all of that. And I think, you know, for us as service providers serving you, you're looking for us to have, you know, that balance of resiliency, you know, for the scale, but in an agile way with the cyber protection and be able to evidence that to you so that you can evidence it to your regulators. And so it's not just about the resiliency, it's about being able to evidence resiliency, which is, you know, is hard.

Bob

When I say about resiliency again, it typically means you're talking to the systems and the processes, not just systems, but the processes, work as expected every time it's supposed to be working. That was our clients' and the market's demand that our systems operate. And I do think the comment you made earlier, Ken, about we were able to handle, I think, the most recent volatility, I'm saying in expert fashion, in large part to the work that went to, you know, T+1 planning last year. People had to really focus on, in a short amount of time, a very intense period on improving not just technology but processes, operational processes, integrating ops and technology much more than they had in the past, and then looking at having the skill sets required from both their internal teams as well as their partners, firms that we all serve, to make sure we're matching up. And I think that gives me a sense of confidence that when we go to T0, we'll be better equipped than we were with T1. It'll be probably even easier process. I know Frank's looking forward to that day.

Frank

I think we're on this natural journey with resiliency and I think it's good. What I mean by that is many, I can tell you, almost every one, if not all of our member organizations in one way, shape, or form, are focused on their own resiliency fell over and stay or how do they recover, all that good stuff. But it's clear now, the next stage in resiliency is an industry-wide initiative where the industry works together in case any one particular member or infrastructure provider goes out, and what does that contingency plan look like? And, you know, people leave their competition at the door at that point, right? The airline industry, airlines don't compete on safety, right? They compete on a lot of things, but not safety. I think we're getting to that moment in time where the industry knows that we're so inter-reliant on each other because of the volatility, because of T1, because of capital flows and how quickly they move and how much more quickly they will move with new technology. We will have to depend on each other to ensure that the industry is resilient in case something goes wrong. And I think it's a good thing and we will begin to work with the industry to help facilitate that and lead it to the extent that we can.

Kenneth

So we have a minute and a half left. Remarkably, we got through all our questions that we talked about, so I'm going to go off script and hopefully not get in trouble with you all on this. But, so let's say next year, when we're in Marco Island at this conference, a shameless plug for next year's conference. I look forward to seeing everyone there. Yeah, and, what's the one issue we're going to be talking about next year, a year from now, from your vantage point?

Frank

You want me to, I'll take, I'll lead with my chin. I think 24x5, 24x7 trading is coming up more quickly than people realize. I'll be honest with you, we saw it coming at DTCC and we worked on it. We've engaged with the exchanges and all the constituent parties, but it's moving quicker than we even thought. How it ends, I don't know, and there's a lot of work that has to be done in the industry. There's a risk component to this, there's a regulatory component to this, there's a resiliency component to it. How do firms go from batch processing to 24x5, 24x7? There's a lot of questions that need to be resolved, but I would not be surprised if, a year from now, we're sitting here talking about how quickly 24x7, 24x5 trading has moved.

Bob

The other thing I'll say is that it's going to be hard to ignore, a year from now, how did the prior 12 months from a regulatory and political landscape and we're talking about today, the unpredictability, how did the markets respond to that? I think we'll be saying is they were resilient, they responded fine, we'll find out. But there's a, we're only 100 day plus into new administration. 365 more days of this? Be very entertaining and very exciting to see what happens a year from now, but I know it'll be unpredictable what we're talking about next year.

Timothy

I think it's that the, Bob is building on that, it's really, you know, we will see high volatility throughout this year and it's going to be how we all handle that, but at the same time, keep moving forward on the big things that we need to get done. Because if we let the volatility just sort of freeze us in place, then we'll be sorry about that. But I think we're going to get it through and I think we'll be surprised how much we get done over the next 12 months.

Kenneth

Well, Tim, Frank, Bob, thank you all very much for being here today. And, again, thank you for all the support you provide SIFMA as well.