Nordic momentum powers Eurex’ cross-product clearing expansion

The European clearing ecosystem is entering a new era of market-driven and technological change that is redefining the role of the CCP. Nordic firms, early and enthusiastic adopters of the continental clearing model, are already proving to be key drivers in this sea change, which Matthias Graulich, Chief Commercial Officer and Global Head of Product and Markets at Eurex, and Mezhgan Qabool, Head of Sales EMEA at Eurex, describe in this interview ahead of PostTrade 360.

In market conditions where both capital and margin resources are increasingly scarce, the multilateral netting that clearing infrastructure offers has become ever more highly prized by market participants. With a wider range of firms with derivatives and repo lines now looking to clear their trades, client expectations of what the clearing ecosystem should offer them are also undergoing rapid change.

An increasingly holistic way of analyzing the clearing relationship has moved the dialogue between CCPs and their members beyond what was typically a narrow conversation on post-trade and operational considerations. Now, conversations more often focus on the various economic inputs to a trade, such as fees and margin, in as granular detail as possible.

“A lot of the client conversations that we have had in recent years, whether they concern margin or collateral optimization or any other aspect of clearing, are now very much embedded in the sort of trading decisions or pre-trade commercial decisions that those clients are making,” says Qabool.

“Five years ago, the venue question was operational and settled once. Today it sits with various stakeholders, including the treasury, XVA and capital teams, because where you clear determines initial margin, funding cost, capital consumption and collateral drag across a whole book, not one trade.”

With a regulatory framework now in place that rewards continental clearing activity, more market participants have the confidence to maximize the efficiencies that they can achieve across both their trading and financing operations. With excess liquidity across the continent falling, more banks are looking for market-based funding.

At the same time, in a world of elevated interest rates and more frequent volatility, the need for quick access to margin collateral has grown across the market. Eurex has seen a particularly significant increase in cleared repo activity in recent years. Eurex Repo term-adjusted ADV is currently over EUR 550 billion, after increasing by around 50 percent year-on-year.

In a sign of the continuing convergence between funding and clearing, this rise has accompanied strong growth in the OTC-cleared interest rate market, where notional outstanding has increased to around EUR 55 trillion, representing roughly a 30 percent year-on-year increase for H1 2026. OIS activity has been particularly notable, with a year-on-year increase of almost 90 percent, showing that Eurex is now an established host for real risk transfer activity.

Nordic momentum

The Nordic region has been a key contributor to this trend, with some of its banks moving a substantial part of their euro-denominated OTC interest rate derivatives portfolio from LCH to Eurex as the details of EMIR 3.0 and its active account requirements became clear. Demonstrating their traditional pragmatism, these firms quickly recognized the reduced compliance burden that came from shifting more than 80 percent of their books into an EU-based CCP, enabled by the rapid growth of the OTC IRD liquidity pool at Eurex

With that lift complete, the next objective in many firms’ minds is to fully harness the power of Eurex’ cross-product clearing ecosystem. This is attractive to buy-side institutions as well as banks, with cleared repo models offering attractive terms to natural cash holders such as supranational organizations, pension funds, governmental organizations and even corporates. This has broadened the market’s appeal across the Nordic region too.

“The Nordic institutional base, pension funds and life insurance companies in particular, is structurally long-duration and a natural fixed receiver,” says Qabool. “That means large, lumpy cash variation margin needs. Their demand is for anything that reduces the cash drag: broad securities collateral eligibility, cleared repo to fund variation margin, and mobility of collateral already sitting somewhere else.”

The increasing sophistication of demand in the clearing ecosystem is rapidly redefining what constitutes a European CCP. Eurex has rapidly diversified its own offering in recent years to serve all corners of the continent’s market, and not just the eurozone.

“We are already covering Nordic currencies in our OTC IRD offering and are now planning to expand to Nordic currencies in our repo offering, in particular in the cash-driven GC Pooling market,” says Graulich. “There is a clear market need for efficient liquidity management, and as an investment and funding tool, GC Pooling has proven to be very effective.

“At Eurex, we leverage Clearstream’s triparty collateral engine sitting on the back-end, and Nordic banks are very active in cleared markets today, with a focus on euro and, to a degree, U.S. dollars.

“We are at our heart the ‘home of the euro yield curve,’ but are also broadening out and covering the full European market, as many European currencies are somehow linked to the euro. Of course, that means stepping out into the other currencies that constitute the European environment.” 

More efficiencies, strategic autonomy and bridging into the digital age

Eurex’ status as the home of the euro yield curve has been cemented by significant advances in its portfolio margining capabilities. Members can now leverage cross-margining tools within Prisma to achieve efficiencies across European government bond derivatives, €STIR futures, credit and FX futures, as well as OTC interest rate derivatives. Initial margin savings of up to 80 percent are possible within that portfolio.

The next stage of evolution will bring together derivatives and repo capabilities and align the margin methodology for repo and derivatives, which was successfully released in May 2026, delivering significant margin and haircut benefits for Eurex’ repo business. However, this is not the end. The next big step targeted for 2027 is bringing derivatives and repo portfolios into a single margin pot, allowing members to offset European government bond repo and futures positions, for example.

While advancing frameworks mark one pillar of the Eurex evolution, technology is another important one. As Qabool says, collateral mobility is becoming increasingly important to market participants as collateral increasingly becomes a scarce and costly resource.

The need for faster access to collateral is one that Eurex anticipated some time ago, going live with a DLT-enabled collateral mobilization service, in partnership with HQLAx and Clearstream, in July 2025. Pension funds connecting to HQLAx’ tokenization machine can now liberate their collateral for margin purposes at near-instantaneous speed from collateral locations connected to the HQLAx network.

These technological advances form part of a larger movement at Eurex to embrace the digital revolution. The CCP is also building digital rails for accepting tokenized commercial bank money and central bank digital money. This project has involved close collaboration with the ECB and BIS and stands to change the fundamental model of CCP clearing.

“These advances make an effective case for building what we call a hybrid CCP,” says Graulich. “This model will at once continue to support traditional rails but, at the same time, prepare for the future by establishing digital rails. At some point, the business taking place on the digital rails will likely become much more relevant than the business happening on traditional rails. The hybrid nature of the Eurex approach will ensure a smooth evolution from the legacy to the new world.”

Building resilience

While moving with the rapidly changing times, these initiatives are also fortifying the foundations of market infrastructure that will ensure resilience on the European continent. This not only means reliable access to liquidity pools, but also margin methodologies that hold up under stress, tested default management, waterfall transparency and asset protection models that clients can understand. Eurex has been active in making sure that its offering in all four of these areas is relevant to current market conditions.

“Europe wants to be less dependent on third countries, increasing autonomy and resilience when it comes to a competitive capital market in the European Union,” says Graulich.

“This is where market infrastructure in the European Union plays a critical role, as the CCP is a key enabler for capital and margin efficiencies that are important for the competitiveness of European players and, at the same time, the backbone of systemic resilience. This is what we have seen in multiple crisis situations, where CCPs have proven to be institutions that market participants can trust without any concerns.

“With that ensured within the European Union, we can ensure that markets continue to function during challenging times and make an important contribution to building a globally competitive capital market within the European Union.”

The article was first published on PostTrade 360 on 28 August 2026