Quantile
and LCH ForexClear, part of the London Stock Exchange Group’s (LSEG) post-trade
businesses, introduced the first FX Smart Clearing service to the financial
market. Officially launched on November 15th, this service presents a strategic
method for clearing FX Forwards, aiming to diminish capital requirements and
mitigate counterparty risk.
Quantile And LCH
ForexClear Launch FX Smart Clearing Service
The service analyses existing uncleared trades and intelligently selects certain ones to move to LCH ForexClear. It also optimizes portfolios with new
rebalancing trades to reduce counterparty risk and financial resource
requirements. Participants can customize the optimization to control risk,
resource changes, preferred currency pairs, and trading partners. The service
can also potentially compress portfolios to reduce trade count.
“The
launch cements Quantile’s commitment to help make FX portfolios easier, and
cheaper, to maintain,” Esben Urbak, the Head of Product at Quantile, commented.
“By using Quantile’s optimization to intelligently clear risk, we can now
drive new levels of capital reduction.” The company became part of LSEG in
2022.
Quantile and #LCH #ForexClear have delivered the market’s first #FX #SmartClearing service, enabling participants to selectively clear FX Forwards via LCH ForexClear to significantly reduce capital requirements and counterparty risk. Learn more here: https://t.co/0w1TyFs7wQ pic.twitter.com/UnXnLKpKyO
— LCH (@LCH_Clearing) November 21, 2023
FX Smart
Clearing was developed in response to customer demand for solutions to manage
counterparty risk concurrently, initial margin (IM), and capital. The
introduction of a standardized approach for counterparty credit risk, or SA-CCR,
has increased capital requirements for FX, creating new incentives to clear
while appropriately managing differences in cleared and uncleared IM.
By moving
FX forwards into LCH ForexClear, participants benefit from multilateral
netting, lower counterparty risk weights, and settled-to-market treatment. This
reduces capital requirements and counterparty risk. Quantile’s optimization
then ensures the risk reduction fits within relevant IM and risk constraints.
Official Launch in Early
2024
Quantile
and LCH ForexClear demonstrated the service’s potential in proof of concept
runs before the launch. Nineteen participating banks achieved an average 51%
reduction in capital requirements without significantly increasing IM. With
network and product growth, reductions of 70%+ are believed to be possible.
“We
can now significantly reduce capital and funding requirements under SA-CCR for
our members,” Andrew Batchelor, the COO and Head of Product at LCH
ForexClear, commented.
Quantile
and LCH ForexClear will offer regular FX Smart Clearing runs starting in
early 2024 for FX forwards, with other cleared products to follow.
This article was written by Damian Chmiel at www.financemagnates.com.
