By Monica Summerville, Head of Capital Markets, Celent.

Senior executives within capital markets, like most people, are hoping for a return to normalcy in 2021, but know that their world will never be the same. Technology is now more closely entwined in the business of capital markets than ever before. COVID-19 accelerated the digital and cloud transformation that had already begun for financial institutions (FIs) and market infrastructures (MIs). Entities that had already migrated their application, infrastructure and/or delivery models to the cloud could rapidly shift to the work from home (WFH) model. Yet the challenges of legacy systems and regulation persists; the day of reckoning is coming in 2021.