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Intercontinental Exchange (NYSE: ICE), a leading operator of global exchanges and clearing houses and provider of data and listings services, introduced credit default swap (CDS) clearing today for the iTraxx Australia and iTraxx Asia ex-Japan Investment Grade indices, and the following sovereign names: Australia, China, Indonesia, Korea, Malaysia and the Philippines.
ICE became the global leader in sovereign CDS clearing since launching sovereign names in 2011. ICE Clear Credit now clears 27 sovereign names spanning the European, African, Latin American and Asia Pacific regions, and ICE Clear Europe clears seven sovereign CDS names in Europe.
“This new slate of Asian sovereign reference entities, on top of our existing European, African and Latin American names, enables us to offer a truly global suite of products for the single name CDS market,” said Stan Ivanov, ICE Clear Credit President. “We’re pleased to add Asian sovereign and index instruments to our growing suite of sovereign and corporate CDS products, and we look forward to working with our clearing members and our buy side clients as they migrate their single name portfolios to clearing.”
In addition to sovereign CDS instruments, ICE also clears CDS on more than 400 corporate single names and offers portfolio margining offsets against related index products. Across ICE Clear Credit and ICE Clear Europe, buy side single name clearing volume has seen consistent growth. Year-to-date, ICE cleared over $36 billion in single name notional amount, compared to $33.3 billion in all of 2015. During the first two months of 2016, the number of transactions cleared surpassed those cleared in all of 2015.
ICE’s CDS clearing houses clear more than 500 single name and index CDS instruments based on corporate and sovereign debt. ICE launched the world’s leading CDS clearing houses in 2009 and has reduced counterparty risk exposure by clearing $75 trillion in gross notional amount of CDS instruments, with resulting open interest of approximately $1.5 trillion.
