LCH.Clearnet Ltd, the global clearing house, today announced it has extended SwapClear’s blended-rate compression offering to enable members and their clients to compress Forward Rate Agreements (FRAs).
The first blended-rate compression run for FRAs saw $1.9 trillion eliminated. This latest enhancement to SwapClear’s compression offering has the potential to reduce notional outstanding of FRAs in SwapClear by up to 50% and number of trades outstanding by up to 70%. As of October 2015, SwapClear has over $66 trillion notional outstanding in FRAs.
FRAs are typically used to hedge interest rate risk around certain rate reset dates. As a result they are well-suited to blended-rate compression, which enables trades with different interest rates but the same payment dates to be compressed.
Cameron Goh, Head of Clearing Solutions, SwapClear Product Management, LCH.Clearnet, said: “Stringent capital requirements are driving banks to take a close look at their notional outstanding. FRAs make up a large portion of our members’ cleared interest rate derivatives so expanding our blended-rate compression offering will significantly reduce the notional outstanding in SwapClear. The encouraging volumes we compressed in the first run for FRAs demonstrate the continued drive towards capital efficiency amongst our members and their clients.”
In addition to compressing FRAs, market participants are now also able to compress Variable Notional Swaps (VNS) using SwapClear’s solo compression service.