EquiLend, a securities finance trading and post-trade service provider, has teamed up with Eurex Clearing, integrating EquiLend’s securities lending platform to Eurex Clearing’s Lending CCP service, according to a Eurex statement.
The assimilation will take place only in March 2016 and will help allow EquiLend’s existing market participants to utilize the platform’s comprehensive infrastructure to route transactions to Eurex Clearing’s Lending CCP for subsequent processing.
The Lending CCP is part of Eurex Clearing’s infrastructure and Risk Management capabilities – the Clearing House also acts as a single counterparty to all trades, whereby reducing counterparty risk exposure and eliminating the need for multiple credit evaluations. At the present, the service is compatible with loans across European equities, exchange-traded funds (ETFs), and fixed-income securities.
According to Brian Lamb, CEO of EquiLend, in a recent statement on the cooperation, “The securities finance industry realizes the benefits of a CCP model more and more. With market participants now more open to the idea of utilizing central counterparties as an additional tool in their trading activity, we felt the time was right to facilitate CCP access for our extensive client base. We are very excited to be able to give our clients additional choice on where and how and with whom they direct their business.”
“We are very pleased to work with EquiLend in our effort to bring the efficiency of Eurex Clearing’s Lending CCP to the securities lending market. Leveraging EquiLend’s existing market position and given the broad utilisation by its members will further enhance the attractiveness of our Lending CCP and be mutually beneficial to our clients and other connected markets,” added Matthias Graulich, Chief Client Officer of Eurex Clearing, in an accompanying statement.
Earlier this week, Eurex’s dividend segment saw a surge in trading activity over the previous weeks that resulted in a record open interest of over 900,000 contracts in the EURO STOXX 50 Index Dividend Futures on September 11, 2015. This builds off of the group’s August 2015 volumes release, which orchestrated a standout performance of 8.8 million contracts, corresponding to an advance of 3.5% MoM from 8.5 million contracts in July 2015.
