Anglo-French clearing house LCH.Clearnet has enhanced its US OTC interest rate swap (IRS) clearing service, SwapClear, to accept a broader range of collateral for initial margin, offering increased connectivity and variable notional swaps.
And in a move to capture an larger share of the burgeoning OTC clearing market, pan-European clearing house EMCF has extended its offering to a wider group of products, clients and trading venues in Europe.
The LCH.Clearnet platform now offers risk-free compression and flexible trade submission and is directly accessible via Tradeweb and Bloomberg (VCON and Electronic Trading) through SwapClear’s ClearLink API in addition to MarkitSERV, a single gateway for global OTC derivative transactions processing.
“These enhancements will support the entire buy-side community as it moves toward the adoption of centralised clearing,” said Daniel Maguire, head of SwapClear US.
New features launched include multiple ways to connect directly, an extended range of acceptable collateral for FCM client clearing, flexible risk-free compression, enhanced allocation workflow, and safer and more efficient portability.
Meantime, in addition to clearing services for cash equities on European multilateral trading facilities and exchanges, EMCF is set to offer clearing and settlement services for OTC transactions in structured products issued by Dutch financial services group ING and US bank Citi, traded on cats, Citi’s automated trading services.
EMCF went live on cats last month, acting as a central counterparty for OTC trades in equities, warrants, certificates, bonds and structured products. The initial clearing participants are KAS Bank, BNP Paribas and Citi GTS.
“We are very pleased to have entered into the next phase of our clearing services to OTC trades,” said Jan Booij, CEO of EMCF. “With the successful extension of our offering to Citi’s cats trading system, we are expecting more issuers, OTC trading systems, brokers and investment banks to consider EMCF’s clearing and settlement services.”