The London Clearing House (LCH) has added new products, new members and additional automated trading system links to its RepoClear fixed income clearing platform.
LCH says it has added Austrian and Dutch government repos and cash bonds (outrights) to the existing Belgian and German government repo and cash bond markets covered by RepoClear. The system has also been wired up to facilitate straight-through processing between the clearing house and screen-based trading systems BrokerTec, eSpeed and EuroMTS.
LCH RepoClear has registered over 62,000 trades valued at EUR3 trillion since its inception in August 1999, says LCH, which recently welcomed Bank of America, Landesbank Hessen-Thüringen (Helaba) and Société Générale to its 19-strong membership roster.
David Hardy, chief executive of LCH comments: "The expansion into two additional government bond markets, combined with additional links to the various ATSs, demonstrates LCH’s commitment to making LCH RepoClear the premier fixed income central clearing service in Europe. We are also happy to see these three major international banks join the service."
LCH acts as central counterparty for repurchase agreement (repos) and cash bonds (outrights) transactions registered by RepoClear members. Users of the system are able to replace their existing bank-to-bank bilateral repo and cash relationships with multilateral netting through LCH.