UK clearing house LCH has announced it achieved record volumes for 2018 across its equities, fixed income, and OTC derivatives clearing operations.
The organisation recorded year-on-year increases across its clearing activities, citing the twin drivers of new product roll-outs and the growth of client clearing.
LCH’s interest rate derivatives clearing service, SwapClear, processed in excess of $1,077 in trillion in notional – an increase of 23% on 2017 – marking the first time the service cleared over $1 quadrillion annually, while also compressing over $773 trillion.
Over the course of 2018 SwapClear’s product offering was expanded to include non-deliverable interest rate swaps in Chinese Yuan, Korean Won, and Indian Rupee. LCH was also the first CCP to introduce clearing of SOFR swaps in July last year.
ForexClear, LCH’s foreign exchange clearing service cleared over $17 trillion in notional, a year-on-year increase of 55%, while recording compression of $4.5 billion of cleared notional. LCH’s EquityClear cleared 1.15 billion trades, with volume growth driven by the onboarding of new clearing members and opening access to clearing from additional MTFs.
CDSClear recorded $1/2 trillion in notional processed across its CDS index and single names offering, while the RepoClear service reported the largest nominal amount cleared in the service’s history, with €197 trillion cleared.
“2018 was a strong year of delivery and innovation at LCH, where we have continued to work in partnership with our customers on an open access basis to further expand our products and services,” commented LCH Group CEO, Daniel Maguire. “We are extremely pleased with the traction and volume records we have seen across multiple services across both our CCPs, in Paris and London.
“We continue to provide our global customers with certainty and risk management expertise, and we look forward to continuing to build services and products further, in collaboration with our members and clients, in 2019 and beyond.”
In December, LCH applied for equivalence with Europe’s regulatory watchdog to carry on doing business in the continent in the event of a ‘no-deal’ Brexit situation, while also applying to the Bank of England as an overseas derivative clearer.
The application followed the recent decision by the European Commission to grant a 12-month equivalence pass to non-EU clearing houses in the case of a “no-deal” Brexit.