AutoRek survey finds firms under the operational cosh

Capital markets firms are entering a new phase of operational complexity and strain as demands from their day-to-day business processes accelerate faster than the infrastructure designed to support them. AutoRek’s Capital markets operations 2026 survey, based on responses from 250 senior operations, finance and technology leaders across the UK and US, reveals an industry struggling to manage mounting scalability pressures, rising transaction volumes and growing complexity driven largely by digital assets and artificial intelligence imperatives.

Key findings include:

• Approximately 85% of firms confirm that their operational processes are already struggling, or will struggle, to scale in the face of growing data and transaction volumes
• Daily transactional volumes now average nearly 460,000 transactions, with volumes expected to rise by a further 28% over the next two years
• Digital assets are now cited by 39% of firms as their single greatest operational challenge, up sharply year-on-year
• Nearly 16% of operational budgets are committed to just fixing problems caused by manual processes.

The survey findings show that firms are no longer challenged by demand alone, but by the operational resilience required to sustain that demand. Daily transaction volumes continue to rise sharply―and have shown no signs of slowing down in recent years―while legacy architectures, fragmented data environments and manual reconciliation processes continue to expose firms to higher costs and operational risk, not to mention increased regulatory scrutiny. Digital assets have now shifted from niche exposure to a mainstream operational concern, introducing new data structures and settlement models that many existing operational and control frameworks weren’t intended to accommodate.

AI adoption has become all but universal across capital markets operations, although what is clear is that most firms are still in the early adopter phase, rather than wholesale adoption and implementation of the technology. These findings highlight a widening gap between ambition and execution capabilities, with infrastructure, data quality and levels of automation emerging as key drivers of future competitiveness, scalability and regulatory readiness. 

Download The infrastructure gap: Capital markets operations 2026