The LSE Directory / Clearing houses
LCH Ltd is a central counterparty clearing house (CCP) based in London that interposes itself between the two sides of a trade once it is submitted for clearing, becoming the buyer to every seller and the seller to every buyer. Its principal service, SwapClear, clears over-the-counter interest rate swaps in 28 currencies, with tenors out to 51 years for US dollar, sterling and euro swaps, and has cleared more than 65 million OTC interest rate swaps since the service launched in 1999. Alongside SwapClear, LCH runs RepoClear (repo and government bond clearing), ForexClear (FX derivatives), CDSClear (credit default swaps) and EquityClear (cash equities and equity derivatives), plus post-trade tools such as portfolio compression and SwapAgent for processing non-cleared derivatives. LCH's defining specialisation is scale and reach in cleared OTC interest rate swaps: SwapClear states it clears roughly 95% of the world's cleared vanilla IRS volume and runs 24-hour coverage from offices in London, New York and Sydney, a footprint none of its CCP peers matches for rates. Its clients are clearing members and their underlying banks, asset managers, hedge funds, pension funds and corporates that need to novate bilateral derivatives, repo and cash-equity trades into centrally cleared, margined positions rather than hold bilateral counterparty risk. Clearing multiple asset classes, rates, repo, FX, credit and equities, under one CCP is how LCH differentiates itself from single-product clearing venues. LCH traces its origins to the London Produce Clearing House, founded in 1888 to clear coffee, sugar and soft-commodity futures; it was renamed the International Commodities Clearing House in 1971, became the London Clearing House in 1992, and merged with Paris-based Clearnet in 2003 to form LCH.Clearnet, dropping "Clearnet" from its branding in 2016. London Stock Exchange Group agreed to acquire a majority stake in 2012 and completed the deal in May 2013, later increasing its holding to about 82.6%. In September 2008, LCH wound down the roughly $9 trillion notional, more than 66,000-trade interest rate swap portfolio of failed member Lehman Brothers over three weeks without loss to surviving clearing members, an episode widely cited as a live test of CCP default management. SwapClear passed $1 quadrillion of notional cleared in a single year for the first time in 2018. LCH Ltd is supervised in the UK by the Bank of England as a Recognised Clearing House, is registered with the US CFTC as a derivatives clearing organisation for SwapClear, ForexClear and its listed rates business, and is recognised as a third-country CCP under EU EMIR. Since 2020, LCH has sat within LSEG's post-trade division alongside UnaVista, and since 2023 its businesses have operated under the unified LSEG brand as part of that division.
