Clearing Outlook 2025 — What Are the Trends Shaping Tomorrow’s Clearing Offerings?

Clearing volumes are rapidly increasing, driven by a unique mix of regulatory mandates, evolving clearing programs and new best practices, paving the way for pivotal changes in 2025.

Organizations globally, including central counterparty clearinghouses (CCPs) and regional clearing actors, are assessing their operations and strategies amidst expanding clearing services, accelerated settlements and technological innovations.

These trends are also affecting the decision-making processes of banks and buy-side participants, directing their attention toward areas such as the clearing of new asset classes and opportunities arising from enhanced services like collateral optimization, affirmation services and improved risk management.

Here are five trends to watch in 2025 and beyond, and how they may shape the future of clearing:

Increased central clearing

The move toward centralized clearing has been a consistent theme since the global financial crisis, the resulting regulations and the focus on liquidity and counterparty credit risk. It has powered a consistent rise in clearing volumes fueled by both regulation and new offerings from CCP’s:

• Eurex Clearing reported its 2024 notional cleared OTC volume was 12% higher than the previous year and average daily cleared volume was up 13%.
• LCH ForexClear surpassed $1 trillion of notional cleared FX options for the first time in a single week (occurring from January 6 to 10, 2025), beating the previous weekly record just set in November 2024 by 21%.
• Japan Securities Clearing Corporation (JSCC), the clearing organization for the Japanese Exchange Group (JPX), reported clearing volume reached a record high in 2024, doubling up the previous record achieved in 2023. December 2024 also saw record-breaking monthly volumes, surpassing the 1,000 trillion yen mark for the first time.
• In the U.S., ICE Clear Credit processed more than $1.1 trillion notional amount of credit default swap (CDS) instruments on September 20, the most ever cleared in a single day. Also, the Government Securities Division (GSD) of Fixed Income Clearing Corporation (FICC) cleared a record-setting $9.2 trillion in daily activity on September 3. In the past 12 months to that date, GSD's total activity had increased 42% year-over-year from the same period in 2023.

On the regulatory front, a significant catalyst for change is the forthcoming requirement to clear U.S. Treasury bills and repos. Two critical deadlines should be noted: eligible Treasury bill transactions must be cleared by December 31, 2025; and eligible repo transactions must be cleared by June 30, 2026. However, the timeline could come under consideration by the new U.S. administration amid industry calls to extend the deadlines.

The enforcement of EMIR 3 is likely to impact the clearing landscape, particularly with its mandate for active accounts for eligible derivatives. As a result, several European central counterparties (CCPs) have expanded their service offerings to encompass over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives. Furthermore, ongoing regulatory efforts to fine-tune the rules on procyclicality and margin requirements may result in CCPs modifying their margin methodologies.

Digital assets

Tokenization (and digital asses in general) is a major trend set to continue in 2025 as clearing organizations examine use cases and increasingly onboard new technologies to support it. Advanced collaboration between market entities, in particular, has set the stage for scaled adoption of digital assets, smart contracts and ledger-based technology:

• In late 2024, the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) announced an industry sandbox to promote marketwide collaboration. JSCC is a leading stakeholder in this initiative and led a proof-of-concept pilot that explored how CCPs could use tokenization to optimize the collateral management process for clearing members and their buy-side firms, including margin call automation.
• Eurex Clearing announced its participation in Project Agorá, a group launched by Bank for International Settlements (BIS) to explore tokenization for wholesale-cross border payments. Eurex is participating along with the Bank of France (representing the Eurosystem), Bank of Japan, Bank of Korea, Bank of Mexico, Swiss National Bank, Bank of England and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
• At the end of 2024, the European Central Bank (ECB) announced the completion of various DLT trials and experiments. With 64 participating entities (including central banks, issuers, banks and market operators) and 200+ transactions completed, the trials “generated significant momentum in digital innovation.” These included margin and repo clearing transaction experiments, which according to the results showed “high impact” and potential immediate viability.
• Another notable regulatory development is the establishment of the U.K. Digital Securities Sandbox (DSS). The DSS will facilitate the issuance, trading and settlement of digital securities in the U.K. on distributed, programmable ledgers, including tokenized equities, bonds and money market instruments. Within the DSS, participants will be able to issue, trade and settle digital securities under a modified legal framework, allowing firms to bring into production new technologies that offer benefits within clearing and beyond. Progress through a number of gates enables firms to scale up operations over time: ClearToken, the prospective clearinghouse for crypto and digital assets has already entered the sandbox with more sure to follow.
• The Canton Network project (operated by blockchain solution provider Digital Asset) has shown promise in helping to bring secure, public chain synchronization to disparate global systems: In 2024 Canton Network supported the five digital bond issuances on three separate platforms totaling more than $1.1 billion. A recent initiative between it, Euroclear, The World Gold Council, CCPs, a CSD and several banks (among others) successfully tokenized Gilts, Eurobonds and gold, demonstrating the benefits to collateral mobility, liquidity and transactional efficiency.

The industry’s focus has naturally shifted to centralized clearing of digital assets and crypto currencies given the rampant rise of these markets. This is evidenced by both ClearToken and LCH’s development of DigitalAssetClear. Central clearing will bring the benefit of increased operation standardization and capital efficiencies, allowing crypto firms to scale within the purview of regulated infrastructures.

Building on these key developments last year, 2025 may be the year in which clearing focuses more so on driving scaled adoption of tokenization in clear-cut use cases, for example in Treasuries and collateral management, which could allow for increased collateral mobility, optimization, transparency and efficiency.          

Market resilience and cybersecurity

Resilience is a constant market imperative, but cybersecurity in particular has come into focus given the evolving threats and notable breach incidents. Adopting best practices in cybersecurity has become a critical operational priority for market operators and businesses as they increasingly leverage cloud services and outsource technological functions. This trend facilitates market growth and development but also introduces dependencies that necessitate attention to operational resilience. Effective governance, adherence to standards and management of third-party risks are essential to addressing these challenges.

This focus can be seen across global regulatory initiatives including: the implementation of the Digital Operating Resilience Act (DORA) in the EU; a proposed rule from the U.S. Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) for clearing organizations (as well as other market operator entities) to address cybersecurity risk management through policies and procedures; expanded operational resilience guidance issued by the Australia Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC); outsourcing risk management practices developed by the Monetary Authority of Singapore; and cybersecurity guidelines from the Saudi Arabian Capital Markets Authority (CMA).

As leading CCPs and market participants continue to innovate, a continued focus on market resilience will be key when pursuing cloud adoption.  Furthermore, industry initiatives and ecosystem build-outs require firms to have robust controls for monitoring and incident management that go beyond their current remit whilst balancing the benefits of improved resilience that new eco-systems may provide to the global financial fabric.

Settlement acceleration

2024 was the year North American markets transitioned to T+1 settlement, a massive change that occurred relatively smoothly given the extensive preparations by CCPs and market participants. But is the clearing ecosystem ready for continued settlement acceleration to sweep across other major global markets?

While China and India are already at T+0 and T+1, respectively, the rest of the world is looking to align: HKEX has already instituted a program to achieve technical readiness for cash equities T+1 settlement by the end of this year. A U.K. settlement task force has now recommended the country join Europe and Switzerland in targeting October 2027 for T+1 implementation, while Brazil, Japan and Australia may not be much further behind. As the arc of the post-trade universe bends inexorably toward settlement acceleration, CCPs will have a critical part to play in supporting these transitions and their members with enhanced services, perhaps following the lead set by DTCC, HKEX and NSE Clearing in India, which have taken on greater roles within their ecosystems. For market participants, the focus should be on increased automation and use of technology to eliminate costly, time-intensive and error-prone manual processes.

Takeaways for the future

Clearing ecosystem change promises to continue at a fast and constant pace as mandates expand, efficiency demands grow, emerging technologies are adopted, and firms seek greater avenues for cost, margin and collateral optimization:

• Standardization: Standardization allows for increased efficiency and reduced complexity. Integration of international and industry-accepted standards will be central to mitigating and removing friction points in the clearing lifecycle
• Regulation: From asset class expansion and operational resilience to cybersecurity and market best practices, regulation promises to outline the new shape of the clearing world.
• Technology: Cloud, AI and platform modernization will bring new value through automation, access, scalability and connectivity, while opening the doors to innovation and enhancement.
• Optimization: Market participants will look to their respective market operators for services around optimization, efficiency and data intelligence.
• Data: In order to manage the ever-increasing velocity of change driven by regulation, firms will need to consider the necessary data management framework and infrastructure to enable smooth adoption and keeps them operationally agile and ready for oncoming change.
• Continued evolution: CCPs are investigating enhanced client clearing structures to support the movement into central clearing for repos and fixed income, which require them to provide greater support for client clearing models.

These few core themes will continue to play the largest roles in transforming and advancing the clearing landscape. Amid it all, market firms and operators will need to consider the operational and strategic evolutions they must pursue to have the infrastructure, scale and data management needed to navigate and thrive in the landscape defined by speed, innovation and modernization.

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