Mike Carrodus, chief executive, Substantive Research
After a great deal of prevaricating and internal hassle, European research budgets will move from being funded by asset managers’ own P&Ls to being funded from commission-sharing agreements (CSAs).
This will align the UK and EU with North America and help European asset managers compete for better access to research and corporates.
The vast majority of asset owner clients will accept that a small additional cost for research will be far exceeded by positive impacts to performance, and portfolio managers will benefit from greater flexibility and ability to access research, alt data and tooling/analytics.
In 2026 H2, the FCA and the EU will re-categorise corporate access as ‘research’, improving European asset managers’ ability to access the c-suites of the companies they need to analyse.
Regulators will also allow data products that directly contribute to the investment process to be funded from CSAs, which will increase spend on alt data/analytics by long only managers and reduce the pressure on beleaguered buy-side data budgets.
Vahan Sardaryan, chief executive, LDA Technologies
In 2026, we expect bandwidth demands to keep climbing, pushing the industry closer to a full transition to 25 Gigabit Ethernet (25G). Exchanges are preparing for this shift, yet some market participants are still unsure about 25G solutions or have invested too heavily in legacy technology to make the change.
Regardless, the market is steadily moving in that direction. More agile vendors, such as LDA, which can quickly adapt technology offerings to serve client needs, are emerging to fill the gaps.
We will continue seeing challenges such as rising market volumes, making bandwidth the main bottleneck, especially with major data feeds pushing the limits.
We have already seen some firms adopt 25G-capable technology, replacing obsolete technology and preparing for a 25G future, while others will upgrade more slowly. Costs will vary dramatically: some firms only need new cabling, while others face multi-million-dollar infrastructure redesigns to keep up.
We are also seeing exchanges globally making fair data distribution a strategic priority, driving changes independently rather than being guided by regulation. To do so, they are tracking and eliminating advantages throughout the infrastructure, including cabling and hardware.
Eugene Grinberg, chief executive and co-founder, SOLVE
Next year will mark an inflection point where real-time data and automation become oxygen for fixed income trading. Historically, information asymmetries and data fragmentation allowed firms to capture outsized returns while still relying on manual processes, limited automation, and stale data.
But transparency has been accelerating, driven by historically high volumes, amidst higher rates and expansion of retail fixed income products like SMAs and ETFs. This new paradigm is making those systemic information asymmetries disappear, forcing firms to modernise their operations and data sources.
As bid-offer margins compress and volumes surge, both buy- and sell-side firms will be forced to lean on data and automation to stay competitive. On the buy-side, portfolio optimisation will increasingly depend on higher-frequency decision-making powered by predictive pricing.
On the sell-side, to keep up with higher volumes, desks will bifurcate processes into low-touch and high-touch execution, automating higher confidence decision making while making sure there is a human in the loop for more illiquid or complex trades.
By the end of 2026, the performance gap between firms that embrace automation and those that resist it will be unmistakable. The winners will be the ones using data as a core input to every decision, treating it not as a side benefit but as the foundation of their workflow.