Trading's quiet revolution: Meeting the demands of a new generation

Australia is in the grip of a cost-of-living crisis that's reshaping how its citizens, particularly younger generations, think about wealth and stability.

With housing affordability at record lows and persistent inflation driven in part by global energy volatility, the traditional wealth-building path of buying a home and paying it off feels increasingly out of reach for many.

Against this backdrop, investing has shifted from a discretionary activity to a necessity. Younger Australians are engaging with markets as a practical response to economic reality - seeking flexibility and long-term wealth in a system that often feels stacked against them.

This generational shift is already visible in the data. Public data suggests a meaningful increase in average daily equity trades, rising around 30% from 2024-25.

Participation is growing, driven largely by younger, digitally native investors who expect markets to fit around their lives. Increasingly, AI-powered tools are accelerating this shift - helping investors interpret markets faster, automate decisions, and cut through information overload.

The challenge for the industry is that while investor behaviour has evolved rapidly, parts of Australia's market infrastructure have not.

As participation grows, so does the responsibility to ensure Australia's trading market evolves to better align with how and when people invest.

From banking's evolution to trading's inflection point

We've seen this transformation before. Over two decades ago when I worked in banking, it still looked and felt like it did in the 80s: queues, tellers, passbooks, and cash was king.

Today, that world is almost unrecognisable. Banking evolved from a slow, in-person process to something instant, invisible, and embedded in daily life. Trading in Australia is now on a similar trajectory - but the pressure is even greater.

Unlike banking's transformation, today's shift is being accelerated in part by structural forces including global energy volatility and AI, which is compressing decision-making timeframes across financial systems.

Around-the-clock markets are becoming the norm

Historically, trading has been constrained by rigid market hours, particularly in Australia, where activity remains largely limited to 10am-4pm. Globally, that model is being challenged.

Markets are moving toward extended hours and, in some cases, 24/7 access. Investors want to respond to news as it breaks, manage risk in real-time, and trade across borders without reshaping their day.

A great example is an Iress client based in Canada that already offers 24/5 trading. On some days, they process more trades than all of Iress' clients in Australia combined - a clear signal of growing demand for always-on access.

The pressure to modernise trading platforms

For Australian investors, limited trading hours create friction that disproportionately affects younger cohorts.

Market hours clash with full-time work, while global events often occur overnight, leading to missed opportunities and delayed decisions.

While trading has long been constrained by complexity and legacy systems, that's changing. Faster settlement cycles, from T+3 to T+1 and ultimately real-time, are enabling quicker access to capital, improved liquidity, and more responsive markets.

Laying the foundations for change

Encouragingly, the foundations for change are being laid. Australia's market infrastructure upgrade, Service Release 15 (SR15), gave platforms like Iress a unique opportunity to reset foundations. This ecosystem-wide initiative - spanning the ASX, brokers, technology providers, and regulators - modernised core infrastructure, improved operational efficiency, and prepared the market for faster settlement cycles and extended trading hours.

One screen, all your assets

As asset classes proliferate, investors face growing fragmentation across platforms and data sources. Just as banking evolved to provide a unified view of accounts, trading must move toward integrated, cross-asset experiences where interoperability is no longer optional; it's essential.

This shift is occurring amid heightened volatility, geopolitical tension, regulatory divergence, energy-driven inflation, and rising cyber risks, making agility, connectivity, and robust risk management more critical than ever.

The call to innovate

From my vantage point at Iress, working across multiple global markets, the direction of travel is unmistakable. Flexibility is no longer a premium feature, it's the baseline expectation. Trading's next chapter isn't about incremental change, but about rethinking foundations to deliver accessibility, intelligence, and speed.

For younger Australians facing unprecedented cost-of-living pressures, investing isn't optional, it's essential. For the industry, the message is equally clear: evolve, or risk irrelevance.