Buckle up: Eight bold predictions for how financial services will transform radically in 2026

The words “transformation” and “disruption” have been thrown around a lot over the past several years as a confluence of major technological and regulatory changes have altered the financial services landscape. While 2025 clearly put the wheels in motion for some real changes, it will be 2026 when these changes are ingrained into everyday workflows and start to shift behavior in meaningful and quantifiable ways.

How will that all play out, and which forces will have the biggest impact on the industry in 2026? Our third annual predictions highlight insights from a group of our senior leaders who’ve been working on the front lines of transformation across segments of the financial services industry. 

1. Real change is coming

Expect increased urgency to overcome organizational inertia and systemic rigidity in 2026. Whether it’s AI, hyper personalization, or the evolution from T+1 to T+0 to blockchain, the pace of new innovation is forcing firms to act—and those actions will unlock real change across the industry.

Firms that have invested heavily in technology and taken chances on AI and new forms of real-time client engagement are going to add value faster and realize greater productivity gains. Over the next year, these leaders will streamline their ecosystems and move to a holistic enterprise experience that blurs traditional product and business silos to deliver a seamless experience for both clients and employees. And, with the addition of AI to power organizational capacity, the focus will shift to creating differentiation, not just productivity.

We’re at the exciting part of the journey where innovative leaders are starting to connect the dots between technology and real business outcomes. As a result, 2026 will be the year where we see tangible changes in the way financial markets trade and how financial services firms operate. 

2. Markets edge closer to the dream of frictionless interoperability

Right now, we’re seeing huge success using distributed ledger technology to tokenize repo trades. What happens when that capability continues to expand horizontally across asset classes with automation and real-time settlement built into the equation? 

In 2026, we’ll see big steps toward the vision of frictionless flows of assets and collateral—a truly interoperable, seamless trading environment where the conventional silos of asset class and market structure are gradually replaced by a focus on boundless liquidity. 

3. Financial regulators will evolve from gatekeepers to guides

When regulated with respect and expertise, the capital markets can be a tremendous force for wealth creation. Handled carelessly, however, they can just as quickly turn dangerous and unpredictable.

Against a backdrop of increased democratization of market access, where restrictions on alternative asset classes and the limitations of old trading mechanisms are quickly evolving, market participants, regulators, and technology providers will need to exercise heightened awareness and flexibility.

The direction in 2026 is not one where regulators and legislators can introduce sweeping, set-it-and-forget-it-style rules that artificially constrain market access. We are accelerating to a place where markets and markets regulation must be decidedly more real-time and considerably less mired in red tape.

Financial markets professionals will need to address the good, bad, and ugly questions that arise in a world where many of the artificial boundaries that have been in place for so long are being reconsidered. A newly empowered generation of investors is seeking to access markets 24-hours a day, experimenting with new technologies, and challenging the status quo of foundational market infrastructure mandates like settlement timeframes.

As those trends unfold, financial regulators will need to continue to evolve from gatekeepers to guides—balancing innovation and investor protection as the democratization of the markets puts Wall Street in Main Street’s hands. 

4. Financial firms turn to chaos-proof data architectures

The accelerated pace of change is going to force firms to rethink their business processes. Agentic AI, the proliferation of new asset classes via tokenization, and the rise of autonomous coding are reaching critical mass and widespread adoption.

This is creating tremendous opportunities for firms that embrace change—and some daunting challenges for those that resist. The key to navigating it all: firms need to build a chaos-proof strategy for harvesting and harnessing data to fuel rapid-fire transformation.

In 2026, firms will have no choice but to move beyond the bolt-on approach to technology as they are forced to rethink business processes. Firms will begin to recognize that they need consistent, straight-through processes and data visibility across all of their products and workflows. That’s not something that can be accomplished by layering on new point solutions. It will require a re-think of their data platforms and a new focus on standardization, scalability, and flexibility to support future innovations.

5. It’s cool to be public again

It’s going to be a lot easier to be a public company in 2026. Though it may not be getting the same level of attention as what’s happening with AI or in cryptocurrencies, there is a quiet revolution taking place on the corporate governance front, which will dramatically alter the landscape for public company reporting and shareholder engagement.

Policy changes introduced by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) regarding IPOs, a possible migration away from quarterly reporting, and a referendum on shareholder advisory services will all have meaningful impacts on the way public companies communicate with stakeholders.

For example, the SEC is making it clear that federal security laws should not govern how companies handle shareholder disputes. In addition, the SEC’s recent No Action Letter allowing Exxon Mobil to collect standing instructions from shareholders will make it more convenient for mainstream investors to vote and will be transformative for public companies as they seek to engage their shareholders on an ongoing basis.

Changes like this may seem like regulatory minutiae, but they will have a significant impact on our public markets. By opening the door to more direct dialogue between companies and shareholders, these changes will transform the way public companies engage with their investors. At the same time, the growth of digitization and more real-time data is creating an amazing opportunity to enrich those communications to be more effective and engaging. By the end of the year, every investor relations department will be focused on their retail engagement strategy, and that’s going to have a net positive impact on public companies—and their investors. 

The result will be easier engagement, better informed investors, and stronger capital markets—and that’s cool.

6. “Show me the (AI) money”

After three years of frenetic investment, the pressure will be on in 2026 to translate AI spending into real productivity and innovation.

Getting to that point will require firms to go further than just showing engagement with emerging technologies or making announcements about how many data scientists they’ve hired and what kinds of new proofs of concept they were launching. Companies are now deep into enterprise-wide AI initiatives focused on driving material impacts to their businesses, and priorities have shifted to tangible return on investment and finding the right metrics to quantify the value of those initiatives.

Stakeholders want to know what they are getting and how those gains are moving the industry forward, but loose notions of improved productivity or increased capacity will not cut it. Are AI investments manifesting in more units produced, reduced headcount, new product launches, or something else altogether? Those results are out there, albeit rare, and we have yet to see a consistent, quantifiable way of tracking impact.

This is the year when we’ll start to see some bold results from AI leaders who have really integrated the technology into their operations and are now able to report substantial, real-world breakthroughs across their enterprise in terms of cost savings, increased efficiency, and speed to market.

Companies that can meet that test will differentiate significantly from their peers and be positioned to drive future value.

7. Tokenization goes mainstream

If you would have polled the industry a year ago about when to expect the first tokenized U.S. equities, most market participants would have said three-to-five years, or maybe longer. Fast-forward to today and we’re processing over $300 billion in tokenized assets daily on our distributed ledger repo platform, Blackrock’s Bitcoin ETF is recording nearly $6 billion in daily trading volumes, Robinhood and Kraken have introduced tokenized equity trading, and the U.S. government has established a regulatory framework for payment stablecoins.

In 2026, a perfect storm of innovation, regulatory change, and marketplace demand have set the stage for tokenization to move firmly into the mainstream. To begin, these pieces will come together to meaningfully alter the financial ecosystem using blockchain technology. Expect the world to start moving quickly from the experimentation we’re currently seeing to a place where native issuers—public companies, mutual funds, private alternative investment funds, and others—are distributing tokenized assets from day one.

8. The great acceleration is coming

Financial services firms will need to be super flexible in 2026 and 2027 with their budget priorities and technology focus. The seeds have already been planted for a rapid acceleration over the next two years as emerging technologies go mainstream.

Make no mistake, the technological changes taking shape over the last few years have been monumental, but they are really just the first steps in the evolution of what’s possible when computing power becomes virtually unlimited. Quantum computing is knocking on the door, and that will have an exponential impact on everything that’s come before it. Agentic AI models are one thing. AI models written using quantum computing will redefine pricing, trading, settlement, and the speed with which incredibly complex processes can operate.

On top of that, investor demographics and expectations for how and when they interact with their advisors and financial firms are rapidly shifting toward an always-on, real-time paradigm that will require a wholesale overhaul of existing workflows to fulfill.

Taken together, this will alter the landscape for the financial services industry. As a result, 2026 is the year when firms will start planning for where they want to be five, even 10 years from now, and start putting the strategies and systems in place to future-proof their operations. It’s not just about embracing individual technological advances; success in this new era of rapid-fire reinvention will require firms to create technology-led value propositions and differentiate based on their biggest strengths. It will also demand firms to stay one step ahead of fast-moving changes in investor behavior and expectations.

Charting a bold future together

The forces shaping the future of financial markets are conspiring to make 2026 a year of reckoning with the status quo. Technology has progressed to the point where we are no longer limited by the old confines that governed the way we interacted with financial markets and one another. The promise of real-time, on-demand, tailored, multi-asset, instant gratification is here for the taking, and as financial market participants continue to refine their approaches to technology, opportunities to transform legacy processes will only accelerate.

At Broadridge, we are committed to not only keeping our fingers on the pulse of these changes, but to empowering our clients to seize them without hesitation. As a leader in making the promise of new technologies come to life, we are working to help our clients embrace the future with confidence.

We wish you a productive and exciting year ahead, and we look forward to charting that future with you.