Ali Hackett is the global head of sales and relationship management at LCH.Clearnet

What were the major themes of your business in 2015?

LCH.Clearnet has continued to be fully engaged in the industry debate designed to help strengthen the financial system. We are strong advocates of increased transparency and have proposed a standardized framework for stress testing, which will make it easier for clearing members and regulators to compare different central counter-parties on a relative basis and evaluate the strength and resiliency of clearing houses.

We are committed to providing customer choice and flexibility as demonstrated through our unique open-access model. We’ve operated a horizontal clearing model for many years and offer access to a growing list of exchanges and trading venues, especially in Europe for exchange-traded equities and derivatives. We have focused on adding services such as compression that has had great uptake and provided greater efficiency to the marketplace.

What are your expectations for 2016?

We fully expect this to accelerate further in 2016 as the impact of new capital rules requirements under Basel III begin to take effect.

We actually have several initiatives in the works that will deliver more efficiencies for the market, for example the planned launch of FX Options clearing and the introduction of portfolio margining at SwapClear, subject to regulatory approval.  And of course with  the implementation of the European clearing mandate for CDS and interest rate derivatives expected from June next year, we plan to be extremely involved in Europe helping our customers through that journey.

Featured image by vacant/Dollar Photo Club