As there is no perfectly comparable measure for clearing business volumes, some might say it can’t be done. With all the caveats in mind, we still curiously embarked on painting the big picture of Europe’s central counterparty clearing services market, for our own understanding. And now we are finding the outcome interesting enough to share with you. What surprises you most? 

• Logged-in readers can read the full lists down here at the bottom of this article, there is no cost involved.
• Read also the other article: “Predictable CCP margin is key to investors’ using cash efficiently”.
• And have you signed up yet to attend PostTrade 360° 2025, on 3–4 September in Stockholm? Register here and see who else did already. Free for operations pros, and sponsor-firm staff.

After some contemplation, we decided to zoom in mainly on the so-called initial margin requirements that the CCPs uphold towards their members, per end-2024. However, we will also present you with the reported total revenue of each CCP, and their annual profit, though these numbers will generally be for 2023 as financial reporting is still pending for last year. Still, if the big picture from 2023 would hold, we are eying an industry with some €6 billion in reported revenues and €2 billion in operating profit, so pretty juicy profit margins.

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Per the report date 31 December 2024, Europe’s 17 CCPs were requiring some €480 billions’ worth of securities and cash (each making up half) in initial-margin reserves from their members. The setup serves to safeguard against the risk that a clearinghouse member could default on its trading commitments to a counterparty. Let us come back to the pros and cons of measuring by initial margin. And if you’d have comments to nuance the picture – or even spot errors – dig in in the comment field on our LinkedIn post for this article here.  

But with this out of the way for now, let us split our story into two parts already at this point. This article will dive pretty straight into that big-picture outcome, in terms of the European CCP players, their volumes, and the rough distribution across the main asset-type categories. Further down, we will become more precise about how we have arrived at our pie charts. But read also this second article to learn more on how CCPs determine their initial margin requirements, and why their methods are so central to the efficient use of cash at their members and their clients. CCPs hold collateral to keep investors safe from counterparty defaults – but just how safe is safe, and how do you measure it?

Derivatives dominate

Now, let’s embark here on our tour of the volumes. The first glance at our overview map shows pies of different sizes, with the surface of each pie being approximately proportionate to the total volume of its category. Further down, if you are a logged-in reader, we will present you with the fully detailed listings per category, with all the 17 European clearinghouses. Setting up your reader account and logging in is free of charge. But first, the overview, for which login is not required:

• We see financial derivatives, made up mainly of interest rate swaps, tying up the big chunk. It is in the nature of derivatives contracts that they generate counterparty exposures of long duration, often months or even years. This risk is what clearinghouses insure against, backed up by the margin assets they hold from their members. 
• Cash securities and repo – so, plain buying and selling of shares and bonds (but in this categorisation also when those buying and selling transactions come under so-called repo: pre-agreed back-and-forth pairs of cash transactions which effectively lets one party lend money securely to another) – eats less of the initial-margin assets, as they must cover counterparty risk only during the two days, or so, from the trade agreement to the settlement, the final exchange of securities versus money as agreed on the trade date. When trade settlement is accelerated, as in America with its recent move from a so-called T+2 to T+1 settlement standard, this measure would tend to come down accordingly, as the exposure period is shortened. In other words, money that could be freed up from this margin bucket is one of the important incentives for Europe’s securities industry to follow the American example, as is scheduled for late 2027. 
• Our rough categorisation also breaks out power and commodities derivatives as a separate category. 
One of the biggest question marks in the statistics so far, is how much of ICE Clear Europe’s initial margin volumes, which are not reported granularly, should better have been placed in the power-and-commodities pie. Also, outside the map, we leave €8 billion that we couldn’t categorise, reported by Eurex as “Other”. Yet another categorisation challenge arises when the CCP does not report IM separately between derivatives versus cash securities or repos. Euronext, for example, does not.

While we stuff many clearinghouses in the same lists, note that most are not actually competing in the same sports, but in different ones. Clearinghouses run separate services and margin pools for more granular asset classes, such as interest rate swaps, OTC foreign exchange contracts etc – down to a Norwegian-kroner clearing pool dedicated to seafood at Nasdaq Clearing, holding the equivalent of €1 million in initial margin. So, while 17 clearinghouses could look like many for Europe at first glance, the choice is often not very broad when one zooms in on a certain asset class in a certain national market. For the “ranking” by IM size in our charts and tables with this article, this also implies that a number three and a number four, say, may not necessarily be competitors at all.

London at the centre

Over half of the initial-margin collateral across the whole CCP industry, lies at one single clearinghouse – UK-based LCH Ltd – with the completely dominant part relating to its “SwapClear” service line alone. The big volumes here come from its business in interest rate swaps, IRS. 

Zooming in on the financial derivatives pie as such, the market dominance for LCH Ltd gets even more remarkable; LCH Ltd has two thirds of this pie, followed in order by ICE Clear Europe, Eurex Clearing, LCH SA, Nasdaq Clearing, Spain-based BME Clearing, Turkey’s Takasbank, Poland’s KDPW CCP, Greece’s Athex Clear, and Cboe Clear Europe. In all, this “financial derivatives” category makes up over three quarters of Europe’s clearing industry, per this initial-margin-based way of counting. Initial margin required across the nine CCPs in the category amounts to the equivalent of €367 billion. 

Cash securities and repo clearing – by our categorisation which is detailed further down, and again, not necessarily representative of actual distribution between derivatives and cash securities/repo when they are co-mingled in reported numbers – sees LCH SA in the lead, the continentally based sibling of LCH Ltd in the LSEG Post Trade group. Here, however, there is close competition by number two: Deutsche Börse-owned Eurex Clearing. Euronext rounds off the distinct top-three group in the category, having emerged rapidly to there. Euronext moved in 2023 to manage the clearing at its own cash securities trading venues, based on the operational capabilities of Italy’s CC&G which it had aquired as part of Borsa Italiana, in 2020 from the LSEG group. Nine more houses complete the cash securities pie: LCH Ltd, Takasbank, SIX x-clear, Cboe Clear Europe, BME Clearing, KDPW CCP, CCP Austria, Athex Clear, and Hungary’s Keler CCP. Together, these twelve actors set the cash securities category at a total of €82 billion in initial margin. 

Power and commodities derivatives have something of their own ecosystem(s). European Commodity Clearing, serving the European Energy Exchange within the Deutsche Börse group, leads the pack with half the volume. The other half is mainly taken by LME Clear, with Nasdaq Clearing at number three. Minor elements are chipped in at OMIClear – which belongs to the Iberian peninsula’s power exchange based in Portugal – then BME Clearing, Eurex Clearing, and Keler CCP. Perhaps not surprisingly, these clearing actors are largely the power and commodities trading venue operators themselves. In terms of initial margin requirements, they total €24 billion (not including ICE, as discussed above).

A correlation, though imperfect

Our numbers come from the clearinghouses’ so called public quantitative disclosures, a quarterly report in standardised format which each CCP will provide for the oversight by global policy body CPMI-IOSCO. They generally publish these as an Excel document on their websites. 

As mentioned (and implied also by our mentioned policy article), measuring and comparing clearing business volumes cannot easily be done directly. In the absence of an undisputable comparison measure, the initial margin is probably the generally favoured proxy, in practice. As the initial margin requirement stems from the clearing volumes, any clearinghouse will see a correlation within itself over time. But when comparing different clearinghouses, one should bear in mind that their risk measurement methods – which determine the margin requirements – can be very different, causing variation even by multiples in how much business revenue is hiding behind the reported initial margin. Another important caveat is that clearing services that dominate their asset classes can reap more revenues from their business – partly because of oligopoly pricing power, but partly also because of the value for clients in netting out positions where exposures go in opposite directions. This could make a house look smaller in their IM disclosure, and hence in our lists and pies, than they actually are in the clearing services market. 

European, kind of

Our selection includes the CCP clearinghouses that are European in terms of being registered in Europe – and members of the European Association of Clearing Houses, EACH, with links to their disclosures listed on its website. So, note that it is the clearinghouses, and not necessarily the trade transactions or market participants who perform them, that are European in nature. LCH Ltd, for example, has many US-based clients, and the geography of the underlying trade activity cannot be deducted from our data. The reports provide some information on which currencies cash reserves are held in at the CCPs, but for this article we have not analysed this. Also, when a clearinghouse applies one margin pool to venues in several countries, cross-venue netting can reduce the margin requirement. In other words, the total initial margin at a CCP cannot be understood as a simple sum of distinct geographic subsets.  

Houses – not groups 

Having read this far, you probably noticed already that several clearinghouse entities, who report individually as such, can be owned within the same corporate groups. The London Stock Exchange Group has its LCH Ltd and LCH SA parts, Deutsche Börse owns both the general clearing giant Eurex and the commodities specialist ECC, and Switzerland’s SIX is the owner of Spain’s larger clearinghouse within its exchange group BME. Overall, the clearinghouses are generally part of business verticals owned by trading venue operators. The EU has encouraged competition between parallel clearinghouses at trading venues, through what is called interoperability or preferred-clearing regimes. Interoperability means that each party to a trade can choose its own clearinghouse among those serving the trading venue, and they can work out the risk management between them. Without interoperability, trades will clear at a primary CCP for the trading venue – except in one situation: a so-called preferred clearing setup allows both trading parties to jointly move the clearing of their trade to a secondary clearinghouse at the venue instead of the primary one. Ten years ago, one could perhaps perceive that these possibilities were opening competition in the clearing area, breaking up some of the one-to-one relations to trading venues where the clearinghouses often have their origins. Still, in the most recent years, the vertical tendencies rather appear to have made a comeback. The region’s leading exchange operator Euronext set up its own clearing business to serve its venues as primary CCP (largely replacing LCH SA in the role), independent equity clearinghouse EuroCCP was acquired by Cboe, and LCH has shifted its marketing profile towards the LSEG Post Trade brand, emphasising its corporate belonging. 

… and here are the full lists

Our categorisation

For the purpose of this article we have roughly categorised the clearinghouse report items (referred to by the CCPs as, for example, services, or default funds) as follows. Can you suggest improvements? Leave a comment on our LinkedIn post for this article! 

Financial derivatives

Athex Clear: Derivatives Market; BME Clearing: BMEC_Financial Derivatives, BMEC_IRS; Cboe Clear Europe: Equity Derivatives; Eurex Clearing: Crypto Derivatives, Derivatives on Fixed Income ETFs, FX Derivatives, OTC IRS; ICE Clear Europe: ICEU_F&O; KDPW CCP: OTC market; LCH Ltd: ForexClear, Listed_Rates, SwapClear; LCH SA: CDSClear; Nasdaq Clearing: Financial Markets; Takasbank: BIAS SWAP Market, Derivatives Market, OTC market

Cash securities and repo

Athex Clear: Securities Market; BME Clearing: BMEC_Equity, BMEC_Repo; Cboe Clear Europe: Securities; CCP Austria: CCPA ; Eurex Clearing: Corporate Bond Group, Equity, Fixed Income; Euronext: CCG_BOND, CCG_EQUITY; KDPW CCP: Organised market; Keler CCP: KELER CCP_TEA; LCH Ltd: EquityClear; RepoClear; LCH SA: Bonds_and_Repos; SIX x-clear: SCP, SECOM; Takasbank: BIAS Equity Market, BIAS Fixed Income Market

Power and commodities

BME Clearing: BMEC_Power; Eurex Clearing: Commodities, Precious Metals; European Commodity Clearing: ECC; Keler CCP: KELER CCP_CEEGEX KGA, KELER CCP_KGA, KELER CCP_TP KGA; LME Clear: LME; Nasdaq Clearing: Commodities, Seafood; OMIClear: BASE

Not categorised

Eurex Clearing: Asian cooperations products, Others

Revisions: On 26 March, we reclassified Nasdaq’s Financial Markets item from cash securities to derivatives, and expanded the cash securities categorisation into Cash securities and repo, adding into it the previously uncategorised items of BMEC_Repo at BME Clearing and RepoClear at LCH Ltd. Some corresponding adjustments to the article text were made.

Read also the other article: “Predictable CCP margin is key to investors’ using cash efficiently”.