What T+1 Changed for the People Who Trade and Settle

Updated October 2026, after two years of T+1. First published March 2024.

The 2024 version of this post predicted that T+1 would raise traders' stress, sharpen their biases, and change how much risk they take. None of that was measured then, and we haven't found research that measures it now, so we've taken it out. What can be measured is when the work happens and who has to be awake to do it. That did change, and it changed most for people outside New York.

The Work Moved to the Evening

T+1 didn't change trading hours. It changed what has to happen after the close. DTC's cutoff for affirming institutional trades is 9:00 p.m. ET on trade date. In 2025, 69.6% of the U.S. allocations sent to DTCC's CTM matching service arrived between 4 p.m. and 7 p.m. ET, and 29% arrived before 4 p.m., according to the annual report DTCC ITP Matching filed with the SEC.

For a U.S. operations team, the busiest stretch of the day now starts when the market closes and ends at 9 p.m. Our post on the operations desk's day under T+1 walks through that timeline hour by hour.

The Clock Is Harder Outside New York

9:00 p.m. in New York is 2:00 a.m. in London for most of the year and 3:00 a.m. in Frankfurt. Hong Kong and Singapore don't change their clocks, so the U.S. close falls there at 4:00 a.m. in the American summer and 5:00 a.m. in winter, with the affirmation cutoff five hours later. A European manager's U.S. trades get allocated and affirmed in the middle of the night. An Asian manager's staff start the day with the U.S. session already over and the deadline an hour or two away.

Funding adds a second clock. Non-U.S. investors often buy dollars to pay for U.S. trades, and the CLS foreign exchange settlement system kept its 6:00 p.m. ET daily cutoff for submitting trades through the T+1 transition, as the SIFMA, ICI, and DTCC After Action Report notes. Our post on fund managers under T+1 covers the FX side.

The surveys line up with the time zones. Citi polled about 500 market participants after go-live and published the results in September 2024. Europe was the region most affected, which Citi tied to "managing settlement and funding issues in the middle of the night," Bloomberg reported. Just over half of the banks and brokers said T+1 had significantly affected their headcount, and 38% of respondents said they were moving staff, usually on FX and funding teams. A year later, a Citi paper for Asia-based investors said 23% of firms' project work for the North American move was scheduled for 2025 or later.

DTCC's own data shows the same split. In 2025 the prime broker flow was affirmed at about 99% by 9 p.m. The bilateral flow, where custodians and managers affirm for themselves, averaged about 91%, and DTCC attributes the difference to custodians and managers outside the U.S. who aren't on automatic affirmation. Those are people affirming trades by hand at the worst hour of their day.

What We Don't Know

We haven't found a study showing that T+1 changed how traders make decisions or how much risk they take. Fail rates are one rough check on whether the people doing the work kept up. The CNS fail rate averaged 2.12% in July 2024, in line with T+2. That shows the work got done; it doesn't show what the hours cost the people who did it.

What Managers Can Do

Staff by the hour your data shows. Pull your own allocation and affirmation timestamps. For most U.S. desks the peak runs from 4 p.m. to 9 p.m. ET, and the shift schedule should match it.
Move counterparties to automatic affirmation where they'll agree to it. In DTCC's 2025 data, auto-affirmed trades were 99.55% on time and manual ones about 89%. Each counterparty you move takes work off the evening shift.
Put a supervisor on the same shift. Evening exceptions still need a principal who can act under your written supervisory procedures, and one who left at 5 p.m. can't.
Write down the last-hour decisions: who can escalate, who calls the counterparty at 8:30 p.m., and when a trade is allowed to fail.
Track late hours and turnover together. If the evening team is the same three people every night, you have a key-person risk as well as a staffing problem.