Integrating Cash Equity Trading with Pre-Trade Financing: A Unified Framework for Cost Optimization and T+0 Atomic Settlement

Abstract

This paper presents an integrated trading–financing framework that links cash equity executions with securities lending, foreign-exchange, and repurchase-agreement markets to surface hidden funding costs and operational frictions at the point of order entry (Evans, 2020). By aggregating real-time fee structures, collateral requirements, and FX spreads into a unified “Cost Engine,” the model enables pre-trade optimization and supports T+0 atomic settlement via smart-contract–based workflows (Swan, 2015). Simulation results demonstrate up to 25 % reduction in total trade cost and a 40 % decrease in settlement latency, underscoring the framework’s potential to streamline end-to-end trading operations and liquidity management.