Clearing has successfully upheld market integrity and achieved its intended risk management function for hundreds of years. Today, our 6 clearing houses continue to protect the global economy by ensuring safer markets while introducing new capital efficiencies to participants and end users.
Strict Membership Criteria | Initial and ongoing conservative membership standards protect your investments and interests. |
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Initial Margin Collateral Requirement | Collateralizing (margining) each and every cleared position upholds market integrity. |
Continuous Position Monitoring | Positions and margin are monitored throughout the day to ensure risk is effectively managed and available capital efficiencies are realized as the value and size of your positions changes. |
Intraday Mark-To-Market Margining | Cleared portfolios are reevaluated on at least a daily basis through settlement of variation margin or mark-to-market margin. This practice of requiring clearing members to pay their losses on at least a daily basis serves to avoid the accumulation of large losses over time. |
Special Margin Calls | When intraday position losses breach certain margin thresholds, our clearing houses have the discretion to make special intraday margin calls. |
Substantial Default Resources | Significant default resources, including more than $200 million of our own skin in the game, are maintained for use in the event of a member default to protect the default from impacting the larger market and world economy. |
Rigorous Stress Testing | Running extreme but plausible market scenarios and what-if tests confirms the sufficiency of default resources. |
Extensive Transparency Standards | Our clearing houses operate based on transparent, comprehensive sets of rules that enable you to fully understand risks, fees and obligations. Rulebooks for each of our clearing houses are published online and all rule changes are filed with regulators. |
Independent Risk Committees | The ICE independent risk committee provides oversight of clearing house activities and ensures appropriate risk mitigation steps are being taken. They are a central component of our risk mitigation practices, playing an important advisory role and helping to protect market integrity while we innovate. |
Market Advocacy | We work 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. |