Barclays Bank and Credit Suisse have begun live intra-day clearing of interest rate swap transactions over the London Clearing House (LCH) SwapClear platform.
Interest rate swap transactions between the two banks are checked for eligibility in real-time and sent for matching and clearing as and when they are executed on a global basis.
Clearing trades intra-day transfers credit risk to LCH within a short time-frame, releasing credit for further business and reducing the operational risks of mis-booking and therefore mismatched cashflows.
Of the 18 members of LCH SwapClear eight are now live users of the Swift Accord matching system, which is used to transmit trades for intra-day clearing, and the remaining 10 have plans to go live by the year end.
A spokesperson for OTCDerivNet observes: "The banks have already seen savings from the use of LCH SwapClear by backloading existing trades, this marks the start of a new era for the swap market and high volume end-to-end straight through processing for swaps".
OTCDerivNet is owned by Bank of America, Barclays, BNP Paribas, Citibank/Schroder Salomon Smith Barney, Credit Suisse First Boston, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Royal Bank of Scotland, Société Générale and UBS Warburg.