ICE Clearing Benefits

Global Flexibility

When it comes to trading and clearing, the challenges of meeting new regulatory requirements in different geographies has resulted in a demand for increased flexibility. In response to that challenge, we’ve expanded our footprint across North America, Europe and Asia so we can meet the needs of the global market. Our investments in these regions have positioned us to provide markets, clearing and product innovation in the time zones and regulatory jurisdictions our clients want to do business in, while still ensuring that each of our clearing houses is able to provide the highest possible level of risk protection.

Capital Efficiency

When applicable, ICE market participants are able to cross-margin correlated products to reduce the total amount of margin required. These offsets are calculated using the Standard Portfolio Analysis of Risk Performance Bond System (SPAN®), which takes into account all components of related portfolios to offer our customers the highest levels of capital efficiency and security.

Product Innovation & Multi-Asset Clearing

From establishing London’s first new clearing house in more than 100 years to launching the world’s first CDS clearing house, we’ve invested significantly over the last decade to innovate a robust clearing infrastructure that spans the globe. This infrastructure, which provides clearing based in the local jurisdictions worldwide, is designed to help us address the regulatory challenges facing our customers and work with them one-on-one to support their ability to manage risk.

Over the last six years, we’ve launched more than 1,000 new products based on direct feedback from our customers, and we continue to innovate with them every day.

Our clearing services span all major asset classes, including energy, interest rates, agriculture, credit, metals, FX, equities and bonds.

ICE Cleared Markets and Products

Central clearing houses	Asset classes
ICE CLEAR EUROPE
ICE CLEAR US
ICE CLEAR CANADA
ICE CLEAR SINGAPORE
ICE CLEAR CREDIT
ICE CLEAR NETHERLANDS
	agriculture fx Equity/Equity Derivatives credit energy interest rates precious metals bonds

How we Help Mitigate Risk

With more than 6 million derivatives contracts cleared daily, managing risk is at the core of ICE’s clearing operations. Through a system of financial safeguards, our clearing houses support market integrity and capital protection by guaranteeing each trade – the buyer to every seller’s clearing member and the seller to every buyer’s clearing member. We become the central counterparty to the trades cleared in our clearing houses, thereby guaranteeing financial performance of each contract.

Our Financial Safeguards:

Continuous Position Monitoring – We continually monitor positions and margin throughout the day to make sure we’re effectively managing our clearing risk.

Rigorous Stress Testing – By running worst-case scenarios and what-if testing, we make sure our systems and policies are able to offer clients the protection they need to withstand unexpected volatility or market disruption.

Extensive Transparency – In addition to settlement prices that provide an independent pricing method for evaluating positions, our transparency standards extend to providing straightforward and comprehensive documentation of fees and risk obligations.

Market Advocacy – We’ve worked extensively to advocate for financial reform that enhances market efficiencies and the ability to manage risk, while minimizing unintended consequences such as the fragmentation of markets, erosion of liquidity or dramatically increased costs for participants and end users.

Intraday Mark-to-Market Margining – When intraday position losses reach certain margin thresholds, our clearing houses have the discretion to make special intraday margin calls.

Substantial Default Resources – The strong risk waterfall we’ve created includes strict membership criteria, margin requirements and more than $200 million of our own capital.

Independent Risk Committees – Our risk committees are a central component of our risk mitigation practices. They play an important advisory role to our clearing houses and help to protect market integrity while we innovate.

Industry Leading Technology

The innovative approach we take to developing our markets and clearing houses extends to our technology. Our intuitive clearing systems are centered around the workflow of our clearing members to help them easily and quickly review trades, effectively manage positions, cash and collateral, and track all their clearing activity in a highly efficient environment.

ICE Clearing Technology:

Post-Trade Management System (PTMS) – The functionality of the PTMS enables easy trade review and assignment, convenient updating of trade details, next-day corrections, fast position transfers and average-price trade processing.

Allocation and Claim Transaction System (ACT) – The ACT system enables you to quickly create, update, delete, accept, challenge, reject and split allocations as necessary.

Extensible Clearing System (ECS) – The user-friendly ECS was designed for easy position maintenance (including close-outs), options exercise and delivery, and cash and collateral management.

Managed File Transfer System (MFT) – Our MFT provides instant access to all your clearing reports and data files in an intuitive interface.

SWIFT – We communicate with our payment banks by using the SWIFT communications network and standard form payment messages, which facilitates a high degree of straight-through processing to the payment bank providers.

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