Shaping the Next Era of Capital Markets Operations

Remarks as Prepared for Delivery at the 2026 Operations Conference & Exhibition

Good morning. It is my great pleasure to welcome you to our final day of the 2026 SIFMA Ops Conference. I am sure you will agree it’s been a great few days. On behalf of SIFMA, I would like to thank our sponsors, exhibitors, all of our speakers, and all the attendees for your support of this conference.

I also want to take a moment to recognize the incredible effort and commitment of SIFMA’s operations and technology team {show slide}. Their ability to maintain momentum and deliver exceptional results over the past year speaks volumes about their dedication and teamwork.

Charles DeSimone has done exceptional work this year leading along with Peter Ryan our Digital Assets workstreams;

Anthony Machiarullo, who heads up our regulatory response and industry implementation workstream has driven our Extended Trading and Alternative Modernization workstreams;

Betsy Gilligan delivered our T+1 Resiliency playbook and leads our Credit and Margin, Account Transfer and Fraud workstreams;

Kathy Fuentes, who keeps the trains running on time for the entire team;

We also welcomed Todd Klessman to take our Cyber and Resiliency practice following Tom Wagner’s retirement. Todd brings over twenty years’ experience working on cybersecurity, most recently at CISA;

I would also like to personally thank Jen Dominguez, who leads the Ops and Tech conferences and events offerings and is focused on enhancing member value through our programming. I am sure you will agree she has done a tremendous job on this event.

This team regularly demonstrates not only individual excellence but a collective spirit of collaboration and member service. Their contact information is available at the QR code on the slide.

I would also thank our conferences and communications and marketing teams, led by Sal Chiarelli and Cheryl Crispen, respectively, for their hard work on this conference. In particular the core team—Annie, Nicole, Kate, Katrina, Emily, Elisa, Steve, and Scott—for all of your hard work. This event takes over 8 months of planning to put on and the collaboration, teamwork and partnership across SIFMA is second to none.

I have appreciated and enjoyed talking with so many of you this week. We are a member driven organization. That means we take our direction from you, so please continue to stay involved with SIFMA and help shape the future of the industry. I know you will want to mark your calendars for SIFMA Ops 2027, to be held at the JW Marriott in Desert Ridge in Phoenix, from May 10-13th.

Now on to today’s program. We have three great panels this morning. They tie together the themes of this conference, namely the constantly changing macroeconomic and geo-political environment, operational resiliency, and, to close us out, a look forward to Operations in 2036.

And with that, it is my pleasure to introduce our first panel. Please join me in welcoming CNBC Senior Economics Reporter Steve Leisman to the stage to moderate The Road Ahead – Economic Trends Shaping Market with Scott Anderson, Chief U.S. Economist and Managing Director at BMO, and Lindsey Piegza, Managing Director and Chief Economist at Stifel.