Cboe Clear Europe 2024 Recap and Look Ahead

Vikesh Patel, President of Cboe Clear Europe, recently sent a note to customers reflecting on the clearing house's accomplishments in 2024 and a look ahead to 2025.

As we step into 2025, it's a great moment to look back at the key achievements of 2024 and set our sights on the exciting opportunities ahead. Last year, we witnessed robust growth in our core equities franchise and made significant strides in diversifying our asset classes – both of which will remain key focuses this year to enable you to use our services to maximise the capital efficiencies you could realise.

Looking back at 2024, here’s some of our key achievements…

• Record market share: In cash equities, we strengthened our position as the largest pan-European clearing house, clearing 1.2bn client trades - a 5% increase on 2023. We finished the year with a record market share of 45.4% on interoperable venues, up from 41.6% in 2023. We achieved impressive growth across the Nordic region, with standout growth on Euronext Oslo, where our cleared volumes grew 74% year-over-year.
• New venues: We celebrated a major achievement in October when we cleared our first trades on Deutsche Börse, marking the introduction of clearing choice in the German market. Since this launch, we have cleared over 17,000 trades and continue to welcome new users to our service. Additionally, we initiated clearing for the Spotlight Stock Market, a Swedish growth market, in early December - representing our 47th venue connection.
• New members: We welcomed Oddo BHF and BourseDirect as new clearing members during the year, becoming our 47th and 48th members, respectively. Their addition was partly due to Equiduct’s adoption of an interoperable clearing model in December. This move opened up the market to clearing choice, enhancing our proposition to our members. Consequently, we cleared a record of 1.7 million trades in December on Equiduct, representing a 73% market share.
• SFT gets the green light: We obtained regulatory approval in November 2024 to clear securities financing transactions and are preparing to clear the first trades. This milestone underscores our dedication to providing innovative clearing solutions across multiple asset classes. Our new service will revolutionise the current bilateral process for SFTs into a centrally cleared model, thereby supporting the growth of this key market.
• CEDX growth: We continued our support of Cboe Europe Derivatives (CEDX), Cboe’s pan-European equity derivatives marketplace. This includes assisting with the significant expansion of its suite of single-stock options during the year, which now comprises single-stock options on over 320 leading European companies from 14 countries. Cboe Clear Europe cleared a record 210k lots over the year, up from 94k in 2023, with Interactive Brokers joining as a new direct trading and clearing member in July.

....and these are areas of focus for 2025

• SFT Clearing: With regulatory approval received, we are excited to build out this new clearing ecosystem in collaboration with market participants. We are in advanced discussions with various firms, including banks, asset managers, broker-dealers, and agent lenders, to ensure a smooth launch in the coming weeks and months. This service should enable participants to reduce their risk-weighted asset exposures associated with SFTs, as well as introduce various capital and operational advantages, such as greater settlement efficiencies, elimination of agent lender disclosures, and improved practices around corporate actions. We also have exciting plans about future expansion of the service.
• CEDX and Derivatives: We will continue to support the expansion of CEDX and showcase the benefits this marketplace offers from a post-trade perspective. By allowing pan-European index and single-stock options to be cleared at a single CCP, the combined service seeks to provide significant capital efficiencies to participants and challenges the status quo of how European derivatives have historically been cleared. We will deepen our engagement with institutional and retail firms to highlight these advantages, attract new derivatives clearing members, and help further grow this emerging European derivatives marketplace.
• New Venue Connectivity: In equities, we remain proud of our status as the most-connected CCP in Europe – and will continue to focus on strengthening our venue coverage. We see opportunities in gaining access to Europe’s listing exchanges for which we don’t currently clear, promoting clearing choice in vertically integrated markets. 
• OTC Equities: We are aiming to activate our collaboration with DTCC to improve the workflow around OTC equities trades during the first half of the year. This initiative will enable Cboe Clear Europe to introduce clearing for trades traditionally settled OTC between executing and prime brokers on DTCC CTM's tri-party trade matching workflow.