Regulatory Focus Areas for 2026

To begin, let’s reflect upon this past year. What were some of the most impactful regulatory developments you observed, and how have they shaped the current market landscape?

It’s been an incredibly dynamic year for regulatory developments globally; however, I feel that some of the most impactful are happening in the U.S. right now. In 2025, we have seen the passing of both the GENIUS Act and the CLARITY Act. The GENIUS Act brought stablecoins and key digital assets under a unified federal regime. Complementing this, the CLARITY Act clarified the treatment of digital asset as securities or commodities.

Both acts reduced ambiguity for these products and kicked off significant rule-making efforts at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Commodity Futures Trading Commission and Federal Reserve, which continued throughout 2025. We’ll see many of the impacts in 2026 with digital assets coming deeper into the regulatory fold.

As we approach 2026, what major trends do you foresee in market regulation?

I feel the biggest lesson over the past few years for regulators is how they need to be much more proactive in the current environment. The pace of change driven by technology and social behavior is not going to slow down any time soon — if anything, they are interacting and becoming more complex. As such, I think in 2026, we’ll see regulators taking more concrete actions in some of the following areas. The interaction of social media and investment will see increased focus. It’s already well documented that investors across all jurisdictions increasingly use social media to make investment decisions. We’ve also seen more potential issues with telegram trading rings, finfluencers giving bad advice, and behavior such as copy-trading.

Digital assets, as mentioned above, will see increased focus in 2026 due to the activity in the U.S. and maturing regulations elsewhere. We’re also seeing an increased regulatory focus on algorithmic trading approaches as high-frequency trading (HFT) firms expand into new markets and regulators worry more broadly about how artificial intelligence (AI) will impact markets. This leads to the last one, which is that as we see increased adoption of AI across the entire financial sector, we’ll naturally see regulators weighing in more.

What are the most significant regulatory focus areas for 2026, and which do you believe will have the greatest effect on market participants?

Another more general trend that we are seeing is the increased focus on cross-asset, cross-market, cross-border activity. This is a result of two things:

• Firstly, the barriers to trading have dropped considerably. It is so much easier than before to trade across countries and there are also so many more products to trade than previously. As the world has become much more interconnected, so has trading activity.
• Secondly, as we have become better at catching financial crime within a single asset or market or country, fraudsters are increasingly trying to evade regulators by breaking up their activity across related-assets, multiple markets, and even across borders. The majority of cases that I’ve written about over the past year have had some type of cross-asset/market/border component. Regulators are also seeing this trend, and we’ll see increased focus on this in 2026.

The above is also the reason I don’t believe that crypto should be treated separately from a financial crime perspective. It doesn’t make sense to create another silo that fraudsters can cross back and forth to avoid detection.

What advice would you give to firms preparing for potential changes in market regulation in 2026, and how can they best position themselves for compliance and success?

It’s quite amazing how dynamic financial regulation has become. I write a monthly newsletter, the Nasdaq Regulatory Roundup, where each month I do a deep dive into a new regulatory development or novel enforcement case. At first, I was worried there wouldn’t be enough happening, but more often, I’m in the position where it’s hard to pick which development to write about that month.

In the past, compliance teams have been designed as highly process-driven closed loops, whilst the current reality is that both the business and market regulations will be constantly evolving. From a technology perspective, this means you need to focus on two things. Firstly, you need flexibility for growth. I’m constantly asked how we’ll handle things like 24×7 trading, HFT activity, ruleset changes, and more — even by firms that aren’t facing these things right now. So, it’s important to be proactive.

Secondly, many firms when faced with something new tend to focus too much on the shiny new part. Compliance is built up on many layers of resiliency, cybersecurity, model management, governance, and other processes that will end up consuming the majority of the effort of a change. When evaluating technology, it is important to consider all these underlying layers as issues at that level may end up dwarfing any benefits.