Making market infrastructure work smarter

Financial market infrastructures, long focused on stability, must now also address growing complexity and inefficiencies. Euroclear emphasises responsible innovation to enhance outcomes without compromising trust or neutrality, with Euroclear Cash+® illustrating how optional dividend payments can be simplified and missed value captured within existing market workflows.

The evolving role of market infrastructure

Financial market infrastructures exist to provide certainty. For decades, our role has been clear: to ensure markets function reliably, neutrally and efficiently, even under stress. Stability has rightly been our defining measure of success.

Stability remains essential, but it is no longer the only expectation placed on market infrastructure.

As markets grow more complex and cost pressures intensify, inefficiencies that once seemed marginal are becoming increasingly visible. These inefficiencies do not threaten resilience, but they do quietly erode value. Addressing them requires a careful evolution in how infrastructure supports the market – one that strengthens, rather than compromises, the principles on which trust is built.

At Euroclear, innovation has always been part of that responsibility. The challenge today is not whether to innovate, but how to innovate responsibly – in ways that enhance market outcomes while preserving the stability, neutrality and trust on which the financial system depends.

Complexity is now a structural challenge

Today’s investors operate in an environment shaped by fragmented markets, compressed timelines and rising operational demands. In this context, complexity itself has become a structural challenge.

Elective corporate actions illustrate this clearly. While designed to offer choice, they often result in default behaviour driven by operational simplicity rather than economic optimisation. This is not a failure of market participants, but a rational response to friction.

Over time, however, the cumulative impact is significant. Value is consistently left unrealised – not because markets lack opportunity, but because the cost of acting outweighs the perceived benefit. These outcomes are not the result of shortcomings in market design, but of increasing complexity in otherwise well-functioning systems.

This raises an important question for market infrastructure: can we help markets manage complexity more intelligently, without altering incentives or introducing new risks?

The distinctive strengths of market infrastructure

Financial market infrastructures possess unique strengths: scale, standardisation, deep operational expertise and robust risk management frameworks. These capabilities allow us to absorb complexity in ways that individual market participants cannot – provided we do so in a manner that remains neutral, transparent and market-wide.

Euroclear Cash+ is an example of how this approach can work in practice.

Euroclear Cash+ as a proof point

Euroclear Cash+ was developed to address a specific inefficiency in dividend events with optional payment – an area where operational complexity has long influenced investor behaviour. Rather than requiring investors or custodians to manage additional processes, the service introduces an optional optimisation layer within existing corporate action frameworks.

Euroclear Cash+ reflects a deliberate balance between innovation and robustness – showing how new, value-driven solutions can be delivered within established market structures, without compromising safety, neutrality or trust.

Investors retain a guaranteed cash outcome, while the infrastructure manages the complexity of alternative elections and execution where incremental value can be captured. This includes coordinating elections, execution, settlement and reporting within established market standards and regulatory obligations. From the perspective of market participants, Euroclear Cash+ integrates seamlessly into existing workflows, preserving simplicity while enhancing outcomes.

In its first season, Euroclear Cash+ identified up to €127 million in missed value across selected markets, with participating clients reporting yield uplifts of 10-15 basis points on eligible events. Unlike other solutions that require significant workflow changes or introduce new risks, Euroclear Cash+ leverages existing infrastructure and regulatory frameworks, ensuring market-wide fairness and reliability.

What matters most is not the mechanics, but the principle. Euroclear Cash+ demonstrates how a financial market infrastructure can apply its scale, neutrality and risk management expertise to support better market outcomes – repurposing existing processes to create additional value without compromising reliability, market wide fairness, or efficiency.

Innovation through collaboration

This kind of innovation does not happen in isolation. Increasingly, the most effective solutions emerge through ecosystem collaboration – combining the strengths of infrastructures with those of specialised partners.

At Euroclear, ecosystem expansion through partnerships and co-building is a deliberate strategic choice. It reflects a recognition that responsible innovation benefits from external perspectives, complementary expertise and shared problem solving. Euroclear Cash+ was developed in collaboration with Scorpeo (scorpeo.com), bringing together infrastructure-level capabilities and specialist execution expertise within robust governance framework.

This collaborative approach allows Euroclear to innovate responsibly – looking outward while remaining accountable for risk, resilience and market-wide neutrality. It also helps ensure that new solutions respond to real market needs, rather than reinforcing existing assumptions or operating models.

Looking ahead

The future of financial market infrastructure will not be defined by disruption, but by thoughtful evolution. As regulatory frameworks mature and markets demand greater efficiency, infrastructures have an opportunity – and a responsibility – to help markets work better using the foundations already in place.

Euroclear Cash+ offers a glimpse of what that future can look like: one where infrastructures remain trusted anchors of stability, while also enabling markets to navigate complexity more effectively.

In an environment where efficiency gains are increasingly hard to find, making infrastructure work smarter may be one of the most meaningful contributions we can make to the resilience and performance of the financial system. In doing so, Euroclear continues to innovate responsibly – bringing greater safety efficiency and connection to financial markets in support of sustainable economic growth.