The LSE Directory / Clearing houses
ICE Clear Europe Limited is the London-based central counterparty (CCP) clearing house of Intercontinental Exchange, Inc. It clears exchange-traded futures and options for ICE Futures Europe, plus a range of over-the-counter derivatives, becoming the buyer to every seller and the seller to every buyer once a trade is registered, so that it, rather than the original counterparty, absorbs the risk of a member default. It began operating in November 2008 when ICE moved clearing for its European futures and OTC energy markets in house from LCH.Clearnet, a launch ICE's own company history describes as the first new clearing house established in London in over a century, built during the 2008 financial crisis under founding President and COO Paul Swann and founding Chairman Sir Bob Reid. The clearing house separates its business into distinct risk pools rather than one blended fund. Its Futures & Options service covers interest rate, equity index, agricultural and energy contracts, including ICE's Brent crude futures, a global benchmark for oil pricing that trades on ICE Futures Europe, itself a descendant of the old International Petroleum Exchange, which ICE acquired in 2001. A separate European credit default swap clearing service launched in July 2009 with its own guaranty fund, margin accounts and governance, and freight forward agreement clearing was added in 2011. This segregation means energy exposure is not mutualised with credit exposure in the same default fund, a structural choice that differs from CCPs running a single combined waterfall. Its clearing members are banks and broker-dealers; ICE's own published membership list shows 73 clearing members across the UK, US and continental Europe, including France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the Netherlands, as of January 2025. ICE Clear Europe is authorised as a Recognised Clearing House under the UK Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 and supervised by the Bank of England. It also holds US CFTC registration as a Derivatives Clearing Organization, third country CCP recognition under EU EMIR, recognition by Swiss FINMA, recognition by the Abu Dhabi Global Market's Financial Services Regulatory Authority, and recognition as an inter bank payment system under the UK Banking Act 2009. In its first week of CDS clearing in July 2009 it processed 5.9 billion euros of European CDS index notional, and it had cleared over 1 trillion euros of cumulative gross notional on that service by January 2010, the same month it registered with the CFTC. ICE describes it today as the world's largest clearing house for energy, processing more than five million contracts a day across all its asset classes combined. Hester Serafini, previously President and COO of ICE Clear U.S. and before that a risk executive at J.P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs, has served as President since June 2020. Its default insurance layer, which sits in the default waterfall alongside clearing members' guaranty fund contributions, was renewed in September 2025 for a further three year term at 100 million dollars of cover, and the clearing house continues to issue periodic ICE Risk Model margin parameter updates to members, the most recent taking effect in mid December 2025.
