Industry leaders call for standards and governance to unlock digital finance

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.

"Digital finance has reached an important inflection point," said Lawrence Wintermeyer, Chair of Global Digital Finance. "The industry participants who provided insights to this research were remarkably aligned in one key conclusion: tokenization alone will not deliver the next generation of capital markets. Success depends on the ability to build interoperable infrastructure, establish common standards, and coordinate across public and private sector stakeholders."

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 research points to accelerating market momentum. Tokenized real-world assets have expanded significantly in recent years, while tokenized funds, digital collateral solutions, stablecoins and tokenized deposits are increasingly being adopted as institutions prepare for a more digital financial ecosystem.

"The findings demonstrate that the conversation has shifted from whether digital assets and tokenization will transform market infrastructure to how that transformation will occur," said Roy Ben-Hur, Managing Director, Deloitte & Touche LLP. "Organizations are now focused on the practical realities of integrating digital capabilities into existing operating models. The report provides a framework for understanding the coordination, governance and interoperability needed to achieve that transformation at scale."

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.

"For decades, FIX standards have helped connect the world's capital markets through a common language," said Jim Kaye, Executive Director, FIX Trading Community. "As financial markets become increasingly digitized and tokenized, the industry faces a similar challenge. Interoperability and common standards will be fundamental to ensuring innovation can scale while maintaining trust, efficiency, and resilience."

The paper presents a roadmap for industry coordination, calling for action in developing common standards; creating strong governance mechanisms, and coordinating to create trusted digital cash and settlement frameworks.

The paper emphasizes that this opportunity is not only significant but also time sensitive. Decisions made today will shape the architecture of capital markets for decades to come.

The full report, The Convergence Imperative: Building Interoperable Digital Financial Market Infrastructure for the Future, is available at:
https://www.deloitte.com/content/dam/assets-zone3/us/en/docs/industries/financial-services/2026/the-convergence-imperative-report.pdf

About Global Digital Finance (GDF):

Global Digital Finance is an industry membership body that develops and promotes the adoption of best practices and standards for digital finance, including cryptoassets and digital assets. GDF convenes a global community of market experts and works with regulators, policymakers, and industry practitioners to advance responsible innovation in digital finance.

About the FIX Trading Community:

The FIX Trading Community is the custodian of the FIX Protocol - the trading language that underpins global financial markets. An independent, non-profit, global organisation, FIX brings firms together to solve common issues and shape the evolution of financial capital markets. Through more than 40 working groups and committees in over 60 countries, FIX maintains and develops the FIX Protocol and other trading standards; helps shape regulation; and supports the industry across a wide range of global issues including digital assets implementation, AI and automation, liquidity, data quality and trading workflows. FIX's work is only possible through the support of its members - to find out more visit www.fixtrading.org.

*Please see www.deloitte.com/us/about for a detailed description of their legal structure.

For further information, please contact:

Laura Ponder, Marketing and Operations Manager
Laura.ponder@fixtrading.org
T: +44 (0) 203 950 3924

Alice Hartnett, Deloitte
ahartnett@deloitte.com
T: +1 (980) 701-3647