The line might be blurry between the market volatility that clearinghouses tend to prosper from, versus changes that risk impeding global finance. PostTrade 360° covers the clearing industry’s specialist conference WFEClear in South Korea this week, running Tuesday to Thursday.
Our coverage of WFEClear 2025 is gathered here.
It is a healthy industry that is convening (at least to judge by European profitability figures), but with risk management at its core, it is one where it would still be dangerous to be complacent. With a brief initial presentation, Chan-Soo Park, head of the clearing division of the Korean Exchange group, suggested three sets of challenges for current focus: digital assets (including managing price volatility of cryptoassets); new tech such as artificial intelligence and “big data”; and the remaining need for global regulatory coordination and equivalence.
Vikram Kothari, head of India’s NSE Clearing, was next to take the stage. He pointed to the role of the 1.3 trillion dollars that the world’s CCPs are holding in liquid assets as collateral from their members.
He described how clearinghouses can balance the capital requirements for becoming a member versus the collateral requirement for performing a trade. In his own country’s case, setting the capital requirements relatively low was a necessity to reach a broad penetration across the securities industry as the central clearing practices were set up. Instead, the safety of the system needed to be underpinned by a relatively conservative margining model, so requiring relatively high amounts of assets from members as margin. Asked for his top advice for countries who set up a new CCP, he suggested focusing on the precise profiles of the members.
The conference is organised by the World Federation Exchanges (WFE).
