Capital markets trends in 2025 and what to expect in 2026

Capital markets trends in 2025

General

• Post US election there was an expectation of a favourable regulatory environment leading to increased deal activity at the start of 2025, post a two year stagnation. However this did not transpire. 
• Last year we saw banks and research providers continue to expand the services they offer to their investor and corporate clients. A number of banks have begun expanding research coverage to include private companies and issuer sponsored content. Data products and technology based tools (often AI powered) are being offered as premium solutions.
• We also saw increased investment and emergence of AI start ups addressing specific pain points and jobs such as data cleansing, financial modelling, research discovery and summarisation and content production (eg pitch books).

Sales & Trading

• On the sales side, we saw a sharper focus on targeting monetisable interactions over general relationship / broad based servicing, with the overall volume of sales interactions declining 8% over the past 12 months.
• We also saw an acceleration in more granular and detailed interaction information being shared by the Sell to the Buy side for the purposes of service evaluation and valuation. These include identifying the party that initiated the interaction (Sell side or Buy side), where the meeting takes place, whether the meeting was “high demand”, the type of virtual meeting (video or call) and coverage related information for attribution purposes.

Research

• The introduction of large language models (LLM) into workflows and clarity around the reversal of MiFID II regulations (with the associated return to joint payments) has increased the value of and demand for research products. We saw a 5% increase in production during 2025.
• On the distribution side, email remained the dominant channel. Portal engagement ticked up slightly, while at the same time seeing significant investment with improved tools and personalization to solve last mile / decision-ready offerings. While aggregator based engagement remained in line with previous years, within the category we saw significant changes, with Alphasense / FactSet commanding a 60% market share, compared to 50% a year ago. We also saw the establishment of a new channel to support LLM consumption  – the API feed.
• With an increase in email virus scanning, phishing and scanning technologies, we also saw an increase in the volume of non-human readership data – the impact of this increased noise has been a lack of trust in engagement data and inability to leverage it effectively for servicing. Our data shows that at an aggregate level 10% of readership data is generated by non-human agents and at an individual account level, it can by up to 90%. In 2025, Singletrack identified and filtered out over 1 million false readership datapoints.

Corporate Access and Conferences

• Corporate access and conferences continued their post MiFID trends. Conferences continued to grow in size and scale, with more meetings taking place. A significant proportion of corporate access remains virtual. Access also saw changes in practices and workflows driven by AI. Firstly, we saw both Buy side and Corporate participants scale capacity by sending bots to meetings, while real-time transcripts and AI generated summaries became standard practise.

Banking

• Bankers focused on leveraging insights from markets (trading activity, valuations, investment research) to develop and maintain relationships while also deepening their relationships with financial sponsors – where deal activity was good.

What we should expect to see in 2026

• An increase in research spend and consumption as MiFID rollbacks come into effect and LLMs increase the capacity for consumption
• An increase in banking activity as deal-making makes a come back across M&A, ECM and DCM
• Expanded coverage and continued focus on headcount within Sales & Trading, as more firms start to use AI to scale servicing
• Improved usage of corporate access and conferences data, including attendance, feedback and transcripts to better identify intent and improve servicing 
• The expansion of the research portal to become a “full service” platform across research, corporate access, conferences and banking
• The first signals of a shift in business model to more tech SaaS like pricing for advisory services 

What this means for advisory firms in 2026

• Be prepared for an expansion of services across research and banking: what resources will you require to maintain or grow your competitive positioning? 
• Consider your position on LLMs and how you will meet buy side needs whilst safeguarding IP
• Look for tested, secure AI solutions to support expanding coverage with existing headcount 
• Ensure you are in a position to leverage corporate access and conference data fully in a timely manner, and without extensive resourcing
• Consider whether the full service portal model would benefit your clients and your business model 
• Be prepared for buy side led demands for changes in pricing structures: what could this mean for your firm and how will you manage this in practical terms?

Brijesh Malkan

Published: 09/01/2026