Open Access

LCH is committed to opening the benefits of central clearing to the entire market. Here’s why

Open Access at LCH

At LCH we are passionate about broadening access to central clearing and the broader clearing ecosystem. By doing so, we aim to reduce market risk, while making the portfolios of individual members and clients more efficient from a capital and margin perspective.

That’s why we believe that market participants should be able to clear all eligible trades, or compress open positions regardless of the venue where the trade was executed or the provider that facilitates that compression. We refer to this approach as open access.

Giving clients the independent choice of where to trade, clear and compress their products brings economic benefits, as well as greater transparency and safety to all market participants.

In particular, open access allows users to consolidate positions across trading platforms, third-party trade sources and work with the compression provider of their choice. We believe this can only help to drive innovation, lower clearing, execution, and compression costs and provide improved service standards for all users.

Robust Risk Management

LCH offers clearing services to members and clients across the globe. This means that our clearing offering has to abide by the regulatory requirements established by financial supervisors in multiple jurisdictions.

While any eligible party is welcome to clear at LCH, members can rest assured that our membership criteria ensures  a high and  stringent level of risk management is required of all participants.

This gives our customers the best of both worlds: a large and diversified clearing community, balanced against robust risk management standards. We take our risk management role seriously, and are proud of the standards we adhered to.