The Shift from Daily Reset to Continuous Operations
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 to batch-driven risk and post- trade processing. Historically, whenever trading hours were extended, it involved keeping the lights on longer through stretched batch windows, delayed maintenance, and overnight rotations.
However, the move toward 23x5 trading, and eventually 24/7 trading, is not simply about longer hours. It requires a fundamental re-architecting of technology, operations, and compliance so that markets can function safely, predictably, and resiliently without a daily reset. Much like a city that never sleeps, markets will need to build continuous, around-the-clock infrastructure maintenance and emergency services.
Front Office: Global Connectivity and Always-On Architecture
Looking at the front-to-back implications, starting with the front office, global connectivity must be effectively 24 hours a day, given the geographically dispersed investor base that sends orders from different time zones. These orders will be released into continuous market sessions rather than queued for the next day.
Well-architected order management systems should already handle 24x6 flow when they support multi-asset business units such as FX and futures. Execution management systems that are horizontally scalable will perform well here, similar to the way they have handled explosive volume growth in recent years.
A relevant precedent exists in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. Sunday trading in MENA is instructive. When it gained traction with international investors, it did not simply add another trading day; it shifted global multi-asset platforms such as Broadridge to build Sunday- to-Friday uptime. The handling of large in-memory datasets, logs, and 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, where maintenance becomes continuous and invisible rather than a scheduled event.
Modular Architecture and Event-Driven Processing
A microservices-based modular architecture allows components to be updated, maintained, or scaled independently without taking down the entire trading stack. Event-driven processing is also critical to this approach because it decouples processing from finality.
Instead of relying on reference data snapshots, the industry must move to event-sourced reference data, where every change is treated as an event. Consumers can replay, reconcile, and reason about state. Reference data then becomes versioned, with "valid from" and "valid to" timestamps rather than just a current state. In this way, trading, risk, and post-trade functions can evaluate the same order against the same version of truth at a given time. Additionally, the shift from pull to push, where platforms subscribe to changes rather than performing a one-time start-of-day pull, is essential.
At the operational level, systems must properly handle trading session IDs, time-in-force parameters, and trade-date logic. FIX standardization can help here, and the FIX Trading Community already has a 24-hour trading working group addressing this issue.
Middle Office: Exception-Based Management and Predictive AI
Moving into the middle office, 24/7 markets require a new operational mindset. Continuous trading does not mean continuous human staffing, so exception-based management and agentic AI are crucial. Success should no longer be measured by how quickly one can react, but by how rarely one needs to react.
Predictive analytics, such as those from Broadridge’s OpsGPT, which focus on leading indicators rather than lagging alerts, will be valuable here. Runbooks must be designed for automation first and human intervention second. Agentic AI can help with programmed actions for the most commonly occurring issues. Prevention, rather than remediation, will become the operational priority for settlement failures. Cloud-based real-time confirmations will also help, with the goal of reducing incidents in the first place rather than merely accelerating incident response.
Compliance: Built-In Controls and Continuous Surveillance
Compliance must be built in by design. This means controls that are continuous, not time- boxed, and state-based rather than schedule-based. Surveillance cannot rely on static thresholds; guardrails must 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 play a role here through predefined actions. Human intervention becomes the last line of defense rather than the first.
The Roadmap: Sequencing the Transition
24/7 trading is not a big-bang transformation. As James Clear notes in Atomic Habits, all significant changes begin with small steps. 23x5 is a powerful step toward eventual 24/7 markets. However, the roadmap works only if it is sequenced correctly:
1. Eliminate hidden time dependencies
2. Introduce event-driven and versioned reference services
3. Adopt modular, microservices-based architectures with continuous maintenance
4. Decouple core systems to limit the overnight blast radius
5. Automate deployment, recovery, and rollback
It is like changing the wheels on a moving car, starting with a Formula One-style pit stop through 23x5 trading and eventually moving to a midair-refuelling-style continuous trading environment in a 24/7 world.
If your firm trades U.S. equities, explore our latest white paper on the implications of 23/5 trading across the full trade lifecycle and on how to build a readiness framework: Broadridge - Before the Market Wakes: Why Extended Trading Hours Are the Dawn Run Capital Markets Can’t Skip
