Keynote address - Dan Fields, CEO, Global Broking, TP ICAP
2 September 2026, London
Looking around this room, I see innovators, financial institutions, infrastructure providers, regulators and market participants.
That is important because the next phase of digital assets will not be shaped by any one group acting alone.
It will be built together.
And that is what I want to talk about today.
Not technology.
Not crypto.
Not even digital assets themselves.
But something more fundamental:
What it takes for markets to achieve institutional scale.
Because in my view, digital assets have been driven by innovation.
The next phase will be driven by coordination.
In 1967, the first ATM was installed at a Barclays branch in London.
At the time, it was a remarkable innovation.
For the first time, customers could access cash outside banking hours.
It was modern, efficient, convenient… but it did not immediately transform banking.
For years, banks built their own ATM networks. Customers were often restricted to their own bank's machines.
Every bank invested in technology, but the customer experience remained fragmented.
The breakthrough came when those networks began to connect.
Common standards emerged and infrastructure became interoperable.
A machine owned by one bank could serve the customers of another.
The value of every ATM increased because it became part of a network.
What began as a technology story became an infrastructure success.
And I believe digital assets are approaching a similar moment.
Digital assets’ innovation phase has been extraordinary.
Over little more than a decade, this industry has created new assets, new networks, new trading venues, and entirely new ways to transfer value.
But innovation alone does not create mature markets.
In fact, innovation often creates fragmentation.
Different networks operate alongside one another.
Liquidity, assets and collateral can become separated across multiple venues and ecosystems.
As a result, participants face unnecessary complexity and friction.
And while tremendous progress has been made, digital assets remain at an early stage of institutional scale.
The opportunity now is not simply to create more innovation.
It is to connect the innovations that already exist.
Innovation creates new possibilities.
Infrastructure enables adoption.
But only co-ordination enables scale.
Put another way, markets do not scale simply because technology improves.
They scale because coordination costs fall.
In practice, that means building trust into the foundations of the market:
Rules and standards.
Clearing and settlement.
Legal frameworks and market supervision.
Those are the foundations that allow participation to expand beyond a relatively small group of early adopters and support institutional scale.
We have seen this before.
Credit markets became more accessible and transparent as electronic execution and standardisation developed.
Derivatives markets expanded as clearing frameworks increased confidence around risk management and settlement.
In each case, innovation created new opportunities.
But infrastructure allowed these opportunities to scale.
Perhaps the best example comes from foreign exchange.
In the 1970s, international currency markets were expanding rapidly. Growing global trade and increasing cross-border investment were transforming how participants transacted.
But growth exposed weaknesses in the underlying infrastructure.
In 1974, the failure of Bankhaus Herstatt revealed that one side of a foreign exchange transaction could pay away value without receiving the other side in return.
The lesson was not that the market had innovated too quickly.
It was that market infrastructure needed to evolve alongside the market itself.
The industry's response ultimately led to the creation of Continuous Linked Settlement, or CLS, a cornerstone of today's global foreign exchange market that helps participants settle transactions while significantly reducing settlement risk.
Foreign exchange became the world's largest financial market not because participants created more currencies, but because they built the infrastructure to use them safely and efficiently.
Growth revealed the problem.
Coordination produced the solution.
The same pattern appears repeatedly throughout financial history.
And that is the important lesson for digital assets.
We can already see the market moving in this direction, with greater focus on interoperability, standards, infrastructure, and collaboration between traditional finance and digital-native firms.
That shift is already visible in tokenisation.
Tokenisation is not a new asset class.
It is a new operating model.
Its significance lies not simply in what is being tokenised, but in how markets may function differently as a result.
It has the potential to bring trading, settlement, collateral management and post-trade processes closer together.
Post-trade provides a clear example.
While assets can trade in seconds, settlement often remains constrained by legacy infrastructure.
Tokenised securities and digital cash have the potential to make settlement faster, more flexible and more efficient, while preserving the security and trust markets require.
That is why stablecoins, tokenised deposits and other forms of digital cash are becoming increasingly important. If assets become digital, settlement must evolve alongside them.
When I speak to institutional participants, the questions are rarely about technology.
They are about liquidity.
Risk management.
Settlement.
Regulation.
Operational resilience.
The technologies may be new, but the requirements are not.
That is why the next stage of digital assets feels less like a technology challenge and more like a market structure challenge.
So what does this mean in practice for firms like TP ICAP?
At Global Broking, our business sits at the heart of some of the world's largest wholesale markets.
Every day we see how liquidity forms.
We see what encourages participation.
We see where friction exists.
And we see the role infrastructure plays in enabling markets to scale.
Across those markets, the same principle applies: institutions participate when they have confidence in the market structure.
Technology changes, but market principles do not.
That is why we approached digital assets not as a technology opportunity, but as a market structure challenge.
So we were asking a simple question:
What does it take for a market to achieve institutional scale?
How is trust created?
How does participation grow?
And how can innovation be supported by robust infrastructure?
Fusion Digital Assets was built around those principles, helping bridge traditional and digital markets through trusted market structures designed for institutional participation.
Because financial markets teach a simple lesson:
Scale follows trust.
And trust depends on infrastructure.
I also believe the United Kingdom has an important opportunity in this next phase of development.
The UK combines deep capital markets, regulatory credibility, legal certainty and global financial expertise.
And increasingly it has the regulatory frameworks needed to support innovation responsibly.
The Digital Securities Sandbox is an important example.
It reflects a willingness to create environments where issuance, trading and settlement can evolve in live market conditions.
Healthy markets require more than innovation.
They require liquidity.
Infrastructure.
Regulation.
And participation.
Those elements need to develop together.
The next great financial centres may not be those that create the most innovation.
They may be those that are best at coordinating innovation.
The UK’s opportunity is to become the place where traditional finance, digital-native firms and regulators work together to build the next generation of market infrastructure.
So let me finish where I started.
The ATM transformed banking when individual machines became part of a connected network.
Digital assets are approaching a similar point.
Tokenisation is moving from concept to implementation.
Digital cash is developing.
Institutions are investing.
Market infrastructure is evolving.
Regulators are creating frameworks for growth.
The ingredients are increasingly in place.
The question now is whether we can bring them together.
Our challenge is not simply to build new technologies.
It is to reduce the friction that exists between markets, participants and infrastructure.
Innovation brought digital assets to this point.
Coordination will determine what happens next.
Thank you.
