The LSE Directory / Clearing houses
ICE Clear Credit LLC is a US central counterparty clearing house, a subsidiary of Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), that clears credit default swaps (CDS), both single name and broad based index contracts, novating and guaranteeing trades between its clearing members and running the margin and default management process that stands behind them. It launched in March 2009 as ICE Trust US LLC, taking its current name on July 16, 2011 as its regulatory structure was reorganised around the Dodd Frank Act. In February 2026 it added a second, structurally separate clearing service for cash US Treasury securities, after the SEC approved an expansion of its Covered Clearing Agency registration; that service has its own rulebook, membership and risk framework, distinct from the CDS business, and repo clearing is planned to follow later in 2026. Within the CCP category, ICE Clear Credit's specialisation is single dealer and index CDS risk, a product class few other clearing houses handle at scale; its own materials describe it as the first clearing house to clear credit default swaps. Membership is restricted to large, well capitalised institutions, its current published participant list runs to roughly thirty of the major global dealer banks (including Bank of America, Barclays, BNP Paribas, Citibank, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Royal Bank of Canada, UBS and Wells Fargo), reflecting a wholesale, dealer to dealer market structure rather than a retail or small broker one. Its newer Treasury clearing service is explicitly positioned as an alternative venue to the incumbent Treasury clearing infrastructure, supporting both "done away" and "done with" clearing models for cash transactions. ICE Clear Credit traces its origin to ICE's 2009 acquisition of The Clearing Corporation (TCC), which supplied the risk management and clearing infrastructure the new entity built on. It began clearing North American broad based index CDS on March 9, 2009 and extended to buy side participants and single name CDS clearing in December 2009; in its first year it cleared 4.3 trillion dollars in gross notional value across more than 55,000 transactions. It is dually regulated in the US, as a Derivatives Clearing Organization under the CFTC and as a Securities Clearing Agency under the SEC, and was designated a Systemically Important Financial Market Utility by the Financial Stability Oversight Council on July 19, 2012. Stanislav Ivanov, previously the firm's chief risk officer during the 2009 CDS clearing launch, has served as its president since 2013. The February 2026 SEC approval and go live of the Treasury clearing service is the company's most current notable development: it makes ICE Clear Credit one of the first new entrants to central clearing of US Treasuries in years, arriving as the SEC's broader Treasury clearing mandate pushes more of that market onto CCPs. ICE has framed the launch as direct competition for the incumbent Treasury clearing infrastructure, with cash clearing live first and repo clearing targeted for testing in the second half of 2026.
