For decades, equity markets were designed for a world that resets every day. Most trading platforms have time-based assumptions from end of day resets, batch driven risk and post trade processing. Historically, whenever we extended trading hours, it was a case of keeping the lights on longer via stretched batch windows, delayed maintenance, overnight rotations among other efficiency plays. But the move toward 23x5 trading and eventually to a 24/7 trading day isn’t simply about longer hours. It needs fundamental re-architecting of technology, operations and compliance, so that markets can function safely, predictably and resiliently without a daily reset. Much like the city that never sleeps, markets will need to build in continuous round the clock infrastructure maintenance and emergency services.
Looking at the front to back implications, starting with the front office, global connectivity needs to be effectively 24 hours given geographically widespread location of investors, who send orders in their respective time zones. These orders will get released to the continuous market sessions rather than getting queued up for the next day. Well architected order management systems should already handle 24x6 flow where they support multi-asset business units FX and futures. Execution management systems that are horizontally scalable will stand good here too like their handling of explosive volume growth in the recent years. Looking at parallels in this space, Sunday trading in Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is a good precedent. When it gained traction with international investors, it didn’t just add another trading day. It shifted global multi-asset platforms like Broadridge to build a Sunday to Friday uptime. Handling of large in-memory datasets, logs, reference data was re-architected to support continuous purging and compaction. In a 23x5 world, overnight cleanup no longer exists. This pushes the industry toward always on architecture. Maintenance becomes continuous and invisible rather than a scheduled event.
Additionally, microservices based modular architecture allows components to be updated, maintained, or scaled independently without taking down the entire trading stack. Event driven processing is a;sp really critical to this via decoupling processing from finality. Instead of reference data snapshots, we move to event sourced reference data, where every change is an event. Consumers can replay, reconcile, and reason about state. Reference data then becomes versioned. Valid from and valid to, not just a current state. That way, trading, risk and post trade can evaluate the same order against the same version of truth at a given time. Also, the move from pull to push, where platforms subscribe to changes rather that one time start of day pull.
At a logistical level, systems must properly handle trading session IDs, time-in-force, and trade date logic. FIX standardisation can help here and there’s already a 24 hour trading working group from FIX Trading Community tackling this.
Moving into the middle office, 24/7 markets require a new operational mindset. 24/7 markets do not mean 24/7 humans, so exception-based management and agentic AI is crucial. Success should no longer be measured by how fast one can react but by how rarely one needs to. Predictive analytics like the ones from Broadridge’s OpsGPT that focuses on leading indicators, not lagging alerts, will help here. Runbooks would need to be designed for automation first and humans second. Agentic AI can help here with programmed actions for most commonly occurring breaks. Prevention rather than cure will be the new mantra for settlement failures. Cloud based real time confirmations will also help here. The goal being fewer fires to begin with rather than faster firefighting.
Compliance also will need to be built in by design. That means controls that are continuous, not time boxed and are state based rather than schedule based. Surveillance can’t rely on static thresholds and must move guardrails need to be embedded directly into platform logic. If something fails at 2 a.m., the system must contain the blast radius, preserve consistency and degrade predictably. Agentic AI can again play a role with pre-defined actions. Human intervention becomes the last line of defense rather than the first.
24/7 is not a big-bang transformation. As James Clear says in Atomic Habits, all big things come from small beginnings. 23x5 is a powerful step toward eventual 24/7 markets. But the roadmap only works if we sequence it correctly. Eliminating hidden time dependencies, introducing event driven/ versioned reference services, adopting modular/ microservices based architectures with continuous maintenance, decouple core systems to limit overnight blast radius and finally automating deployment, recovery and rollback. Its like changing the wheels on this moving car, starting with a Formula One style pit stop first via 23x5 trading and eventually moving to mid-air refueling style continuous trading environment in a 24/7 world.