LME, NSE Clearing and Nasdaq Clearing talk tech at WFE Clear Toronto 2026.
Technology change in central clearing is no longer being driven by market demand but by the sheer pace of innovation — a shift even regulators are now trying to keep up with. That was the message from Christian Sjoberg, Head of Nasdaq Clearing, who told delegates at WFE Clear 2026 that CCPs are being pushed forward because “regulators are accelerating exemptions just to stay ahead of innovation.” He added that regulatory innovation itself is becoming a geopolitical position, with jurisdictions racing to modernise their frameworks.
Panellists from NSE Clearing, LME Clear, Nasdaq Clearing and the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago outlined the forces reshaping clearing infrastructure: surging volumes, new settlement models, cyber escalation, tokenisation, AI‑driven tooling and the operational demands of a 24/7 market.
NSE Clearing’s Vikram Kothari described India’s post‑COVID leap from 24 million to 320 million daily trades, prompting a shift to horizontally scalable systems and a live‑tested ability to fail over to a competing CCP within 45 minutes. “We compete on market share, but resilience is shared infrastructure,” he said.
LME Clear’s Michael Carty said resilience has moved from compliance to continuous engineering. LME is replacing its 2014 platform with a zero‑downtime, microservices‑based system built for real‑time monitoring, cyber recovery and future tokenised collateral flows. “Any new CCP system must be built like a mission‑critical utility, not a back‑office engine,” he said.
Sjoberg outlined Nasdaq’s plan to tokenise all U.S. securities and offer dual settlement rails, while in Europe the firm is developing a parallel settlement model with Börse Stuttgart to bypass national post‑trade silos.
From the supervisory side, Cynthia O’Leary of the Chicago Fed warned that new technologies introduce new interdependencies. Research into using stablecoins for variation margin showed liquidity frictions can spill across markets, while the 2024 CrowdStrike outage exposed “hidden sources of interconnectedness risk.”
Across the panel, the conclusion was clear: CCPs are modernising because the technological environment demands it. Innovation velocity—not customer pull—is now the defining force in clearing.
