GDF, FIX Trading Community and Deloitte publish joint white paper on the future of financial market infrastructure.

14 September 2026, New York & London: Global Digital Finance (GDF), the FIX Trading Community (FIX), and Deloitte today released a joint white paper, The Convergence Imperative: Building Interoperable Digital Financial Market Infrastructure for the Future, outlining the critical actions needed to enable digital asset markets to scale safely and efficiently alongside existing financial market infrastructure.

Based on extensive interviews and roundtable discussions with 36 senior executives and industry participants across 29 global financial institutions, market infrastructure providers, asset managers, exchanges, custodians, digital asset firms and technology providers, the report identifies an industry consensus: the future of finance will be defined by convergence rather than replacement. Traditional and digital financial market infrastructures will coexist for years to come, creating an urgent need for interoperability across systems, institutions, and jurisdictions.

The white paper finds that while tokenization is rapidly moving from experimentation to implementation, the principal barriers to adoption are no longer technological. Instead, the industry’s most pressing challenges lie in standards, governance, data harmonization, operational readiness, and the development of trusted digital money capable of supporting institutional-scale settlement. The report highlights eight key findings:

• Legacy and digital market infrastructures will operate in parallel in a long-term ‘dual-stack’ environment.
• Interoperability is a strategic imperative spanning technical, legal, operational, data, and regulatory dimensions.
• Common standards have become a greater constraint than technological innovation.
• Governance and industry coordination are as important as infrastructure development.
• Operational transformation remains a larger challenge than technology deployment.
• Tokenization is expected to evolve through incremental, commercial use-case driven adoption rather than sudden disruption.
• Trusted digital money is essential for scalable digital finance.
• Institutional trust remains the foundation of market adoption.

The report points out that the industry cannot rely on market forces alone to achieve convergence. Shared standards for elements including instrument identifiers, wallet schemas, legal entity mapping, event taxonomies, settlement processes and messaging protocols will require deliberate collaboration between market participants, standards bodies, technology providers, regulators, and policymakers.

Read the full report, The Convergence Imperative: Building Interoperable Digital Financial Market Infrastructure for the Future and watch the accompanying introductory webinar.