Pan-European clearing house EuroCCP has approved Skandinaviska Enskilda Banken (SEB) and Santander Investment Services as participants, bringing the total number of approved clearing participants to 21. Santander has already gone live on the platform.
Eleven of the approved firms are general clearing participants, which clear for themselves and other trading firms who are not EuroCCP participants. The remaining firms are individual participants who clear only their own trades. About 40 trading firms currently clear through EuroCCP using general clearing participants.
EuroCCP clears trades for Turquoise, a pan-European multilateral trading facility (MTF), and will also provide clearing services to two NYSE Euronext group projects – the SmartPool dark liquidity platform and the NYSE Arca Europe MTF – which are expected to launch in Q1 2009.
“Our volume and the number of participants using EuroCCP has continued to grow, and we are continuing to look at expanding the markets and securities we clear and settle,” said Diana Chan, CEO, EuroCCP, in a statement. “The debut of both SmartPool and the high frequency trading platform NYSE Arca Europe in the first quarter of 2009 will also bring more volume and participants into EuroCCP.”
EuroCCP’s volume peaked at more than 500,000 transactions in a single day within its first month of full operation. EuroCCP started clearing trades in Italian securities in October, and is preparing to expand its operations to cover SmartPool and NYSE Arca Europe.