The LSE Directory / Clearing houses
OCC (formally The Options Clearing Corporation) is a central counterparty clearinghouse headquartered in Chicago, founded in 1973. It sits between the two sides of every trade it clears, becoming the buyer to every seller and the seller to every buyer, and is the sole clearing organization for all listed options traded on US exchanges. Beyond options, it clears certain futures products and settles securities lending transactions through its Market Loan and Hedge programs. The products it handles span equity options, ETF options, index options, FLEX options, weekly and quarterly expirations, LEAPS, OTC index options and USD cash settled currency options. OCC differs from a typical for profit exchange clearinghouse in its ownership and remit. Rather than belonging to one trading venue, it is jointly owned by Cboe Global Markets, Nasdaq and NYSE (via Intercontinental Exchange) and operates as an at cost, member governed utility serving more than 100 clearing members and, as of the addition of MIAX Futures Exchange in May 2026, 21 exchanges and trading platforms. That cross exchange, non profit seeking structure is the main way it differs from a clearinghouse tied to a single exchange group. Its margin methodology, the System for Theoretical Analysis and Numerical Simulation (STANS), together with a mutualized clearing fund contributed by members, backstops the entire US listed options market rather than one venue's flow. OCC was established in 1973 as the clearinghouse for five listed options markets and has grown alongside the US options market's expansion; it cleared 1.60 billion options contracts in June 2026 alone, a volume 45 percent higher than June 2025, with year to date average daily volume for 2026 running at roughly 71 million contracts. It has been designated a Systemically Important Financial Market Utility under the Dodd Frank Act since July 2012, and is dually regulated as a registered clearing agency by the SEC and a registered derivatives clearing organization by the CFTC. In February 2023 it settled with both regulators over deficiencies in its operational risk management, including a failure to fully incorporate a margin add on charge into its clearing fund calculation, and paid a $5 million CFTC penalty as part of that settlement. Andrej Bolkovic has been chief executive officer since 2023, succeeding John P. Davidson, and Stephen Luparello has chaired the board since 2025, succeeding Craig Donohue. OCC also runs the Options Industry Council, a free investor education program on listed options. OCC has spent several years rebuilding its clearing, risk and data infrastructure under a program called Ovation, a cloud based replacement for its legacy clearing system; after pausing external testing in mid-2025 to focus on internal work, it resumed market participant testing in June 2026 ahead of a planned launch. Separately, in 2026 OCC proposed changing how clearing fund contributions are allocated among its member firms, a proposal that drew public support from large banks and market making firms and opposition from retail brokerage groups over the added costs it would impose on them.
