Global clearing house LCH has just announced that 2019 was another record year for volumes across multiple asset classes. Activity in its OTC derivatives and fixed income clearing services as well as its SwapAgent franchise exceeded 2018’s volumes.
Daniel Maguire, CEO, LCH, and Group Director, Post Trade, London Stock Exchange Group, commented:
2019 has been another successful year for LCH with record levels of activity across many of our services. We’ve continued to collaborate with the market to launch efficient and resilient solutions to support our customers’ risk management and capital efficiency. As we move into 2020, LCH, and the LSEG Post Trade division as a whole, is looking forward to continuing to partner with the market to foster further innovation and enable compliance with regulatory reforms, including the migration to alternative reference rates.
SwapClear, LCH’s interest rate derivatives clearing service, registered over $1,229 trillion in notional last year, up 14% from 2018’s volumes. Compression volumes also continued to grow, with more than $920 trillion compressed over the course of the year, an increase of 19% YoY. During the year, LCH was the first CCP to launch clearing for €STR swaps and expanded its non-deliverable swaps offering to cover five additional currencies.
LCH SwapAgent’s non-cleared derivatives service saw growth in cross-currency swaps offering, with $726 billion processed during 2019. SwapAgent now has 16 members live and actively using the service.
ForexClear, LCH’s FX derivatives clearing service has continued to increase its product offering and volumes in 2019, with over $18 trillion in notional cleared during 2019, up 5%. Of this $60.5 bn was client cleared notional, with volumes having increased by 6 times from 2018.
CDSClear also reported an increase of 23% YoY, with €1.5 trillion of notional cleared in 2019 across index and single names.
RepoClear reported a record year for nominal cleared in 2019, with €212 trillion cleared at LCH during the year, up 7% YoY. In Q1 2019, LCH’s members consolidated their Euro-denominated repo clearing activity at LCH SA, enabling them to benefit from the netting efficiencies of T2S.
EquityClear cleared 1.4 billion trade sides across LCH Ltd and SA during 2019. This included trades from newly connected European trading venues from Aquis, Cboe and Turquoise. At LCH SA, 2019 saw the introduction of clearing for all Euronext ISINs traded on Turquoise. LCH SA’s listed derivatives franchise continued to see growth in Single Stock Futures and Single Stock Dividend futures, with 9 million single stock futures cleared in 2019, three times the volume of 2018’s activity.