The LSE Directory / Clearing houses
Fixed Income Clearing Corporation is a wholly owned clearing subsidiary of the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation, headquartered in New York. It acts as the central counterparty for the US government securities market: through its Government Securities Division it matches, nets, and guarantees settlement of trades in Treasury bills, notes, bonds, and repurchase agreements. A second unit, the Mortgage-Backed Securities Division, performs equivalent real-time trade matching, confirmation, netting, and electronic pool notification for the agency mortgage-backed securities market. By interposing itself between the two sides of a trade, FICC guarantees completion and nets offsetting positions, reducing the bilateral settlement exposure that would otherwise sit directly between dealers. FICC's members are institutional: registered broker-dealers, banks, government securities dealers, and inter-dealer brokers join directly, while buy-side firms such as hedge funds, asset managers, and mortgage originators typically clear indirectly through the Sponsored Membership Program or Agent Clearing Service, using a direct member as sponsor rather than joining outright. For most of its history FICC has been the only meaningful central counterparty for centrally cleared US Treasury cash and repo trades. That began to change in December 2025, when the SEC approved CME Securities Clearing Inc as a second registered clearing agency for Treasury securities, with ICE Clear Credit also pursuing a Treasury clearing service, giving the market its first credible alternative to FICC. FICC was formed in 2003 through the merger of two older DTCC clearing units, the Government Securities Clearing Corporation, founded in 1986, and the Mortgage-Backed Securities Clearing Corporation, founded in 1979, giving members a single point of access for fixed income clearing. In July 2012 the Financial Stability Oversight Council designated FICC a systemically important financial market utility under Title VIII of the Dodd-Frank Act, subjecting it to heightened SEC oversight and Federal Reserve access. Frank La Salla, DTCC's president and CEO since 2022, also serves as president and CEO of FICC and DTCC's other principal clearing subsidiaries. FICC's Government Securities Division processed a single-day record of $11.8 trillion on June 30, 2025, illustrating the market's scale even ahead of the SEC's Treasury clearing mandate taking full effect. Under the SEC's Treasury Clearing Rule, adopted in December 2023 with compliance deadlines extended in February 2025, direct participants must centrally clear eligible Treasury cash transactions by December 31, 2026, and repo transactions by June 30, 2027. DTCC has estimated the mandate will bring roughly $4 trillion of additional daily cash and repo volume into clearing at FICC. As of mid-2026, FICC is mid-implementation of that expansion, onboarding new direct and sponsored members ahead of the cash deadline, while adjusting to its first competitive entrant in CME Securities Clearing.
