As the exchange trading business embarks on innovation designed to boost revenues — from longer trading days to enabling tokenized equity trading — the exchange companies are also facing added risk, says Fitch Ratings.
In a new report, the rating agency said that recent efforts by the big U.S. exchanges — Nasdaq and the NYSE — to extend their trading hours and to begin trading tokenized equities in the second half of 2026, will raise both operational and counterparty risks for the exchanges.
Extending the trading day will increase the exchanges’ revenues, Fitch noted. Revenues tied to trading volumes represented 51% of total revenue at Nasdaq, and 56% for the NYSE’s parent company, Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), in 2025.
Additionally, longer trading hours will enable the traditional exchanges to “compete more effectively with cryptocurrency exchanges and alternative trading systems (ATS), which typically operate 24 hours a day,” it said.
However, these innovations also come with a variety of added risks, Fitch cautioned.
For example, extended trading hours “will add complexity to margining processes and liquidity management, as well as necessitate updated technological infrastructure to handle the higher volume.”
At the same time, the advent of tokenized trading will also entail added operational risk, it said — including “greater exposure to cyber threats, and uncertainty about whether blockchain infrastructure can scale to the volumes major exchanges require.”
Fitch said that the risk frameworks for the large exchanges are well established to handle higher trading volumes, but that their regulatory compliance burdens may increase — as regulators will likely demand increased reporting to guard systemic stability by ensuring the “transparency and reliability” of the major exchanges.