London Clearing House is to extend its LCH RepoClear service to three new government bond markets - Ireland, Finland and Portugal - nearly doubling the range of European markets covered.
These additions take LCH RepoClear's coverage of European government bond markets to seven including Germany, Belgium, Holland, Austria. LCH RepoClear currently clears business in excess of €2 trillion per month.
John Burke, director, LCH RepoClear comments: "The addition of Ireland, Finland and Portugal will also allow LCH to include these markets in the basket of eligible government bond securities that comprise its recently introduced Euro 12 General Collateral basket, thus providing traders of general collateral a broader range of markets and securities from which to allocate."
The new markets will be added to RepoClear by the end of April and LCH is confident that the introduction of its CCP service will result in a marked increase in trading volumes in those markets. The clearer says that trading in Dutch government bonds have more than trebled to over €100 billion of business per month since their addition to LCH RepoClear in December 2000.