Global clearing house LCH has reported record volumes across its clearing services in 2018, from equities, fixed income, and OTC derivatives clearing services.
The company states that increased volumes across both clearing houses have been driven by the roll-out of new products, and growth of client clearing. LCH’s FX derivatives clearing service, ForexClear, cleared over $17 trillion in notional in 2018, up 55 percent.
The firm saw increased emerging market and G10 NDF flows from members and customers into clearing to achieve greater efficiencies, having compressed $4.5 billion of cleared notional.
Daniel Maguire, Chief Executive Officer at LCH Group, commented:
“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. 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.”
LCH’s interest rate derivatives clearing service, SwapClear, processed over $1 quadrillion in 2018. The record $1,077 trillion in notional was an increase of 23 percent year-over-year. LCH estimates SwapClear’s compression services have saved its customers $39.5 billion in capital.
CDSClear also experienced an increase of 12% YoY in volumes to a record of €1.2 trillion in notional processed across its CDS index and single names offering. End-user client clearing volumes increased by five times compared with the previous year.
RepoClear cleared €197 trillion across LCH Ltd and LCH SA, up 13% from 2017, with 10 new memberships and over 75 market extensions reflecting members’ appetite to benefit from the expanding Sterling and Euro netting pools across the clearing houses.
LCH’s EquityClear set a new record of 1.15 billion trades cleared driven by onboarding of new clearing members and opening access to clearing from additional MTFs.
LCH launched a number of new product offerings during the year, including clearing of deliverable FX Options in July 2018 in partnership with CLS. Non Deliverable Interest Rate Swaps clearing was introduced in Chinese Yuan, Korean Won, and Indian Rupee. LCH received a licence for clearing NDFs in Japan and the company became the first CCP to introduce clearing of SOFR swaps, in July 2018. LCH’s EquityClear has expanded in the Nordic region and in Spain and onboarded Turquoise as an additional trading venue for Euronext Growth stocks.
