Apex Clearing and Custody as it Ought to Be

Each futures exchange has its own clearing corporation. Members of these exchanges must clear their trades through the clearing corporation at the end of each trading session and deposit a sum of money based on the clearing corporation’s margin requirements to cover their debit balance. The clearing corporations help to keep markets operating in a timely and orderly manner. This, in turn, gives more entities confidence in entering futures trades to hedge their various exposures.

HKICL provides interbank clearing and settlement services to all banks in Hong Kong and operates a central clearing and settlement system for public and private debt securities on behalf of the HKMA. Sometimes entities appear to target Hong Kong investors whilst not having been licensed to carry out regulated activities in Hong Kong. They often adopt names similar to legitimate financial institutions to confuse investors. Alternatively, such unlicensed entities may provide financial investment trading platforms on the Internet.

It created CCASS, the central clearing and settlement system, which started operating in 1992 and became the central counterparty for all CCASS participants. The clearing operation is based on the immobilisation of share certificates in a central depository. Share settlement is on a continuous net settlement basis by electronic book entry to participants' stock accounts in CCASS.

As discussed above, a fundamental attribute of liquidity resources is that OCC can quickly access liquidity in the event of a Clearing Member default or market disruption. By necessity, funds must be made available to OCC within 60 minutes of OCC's delivering Eligible Securities, and the institutional investor is not permitted to rehypothecate purchased securities. Any requirement to allow liquidity providers to deny or delay funding would potentially delay OCC's access to liquidity resources, which could negatively affect the safety and soundness of the U.S. markets.

HKICL is committed to its mission of providing safe and efficient financial infrastructure, offering state-of-the-art local and cross-border solutions... DTCC's Michele Hillery and Karen Duffy provide an overview and udpate on DTCC’s private, permissioned DLT platform. "HKEX successfully launches second phase of Closing Auction Session for its securities market". "HKEX plans to introduce Phase 2 of securities market's Closing Auction Session". "HKEX Archived 30 September 2007 at the Wayback Machine." History of HK exchange. Holding company of the Stock Exchange of Hong Kong Ltd. and Hong Kong Futures Exchange Ltd.

LCH SA is our Continental European clearing house, offering clearing services for credit default swaps , options on CDS, repos and fixed income, commodities, cash equities, and equity derivatives. Members and clients benefit from an open-access model that offers a choice of execution venues, delivering unprecedented clearing company choice and efficiencies to the marketplace. As noted above, under Rule 17Ad-22, committed arrangements, such as repurchase agreements, are only qualifying liquid resources where such agreements do not include material adverse change provisions. Moreover, the non-banks are voluntarily participating in the facility.

With respect to OCC's overall liquidity plan, the Non-Bank Liquidity Facility program reduces the concentration of OCC's counterparty exposure by diversifying its base of liquidity providers among banks and non-bank, non-Clearing Member institutional investors, such as pension funds or insurance companies. Between 11 January 2008 and 7 April 2008, HKEX launched a consultation paper proposing changes to the Listing Rules "to address 18 substantive policy issues pertaining to corporate governance and initial listing criteria". On 28 November 2008, new rules were announced which included, inter alia, limitation of directors' trading in their companies' shares between the end of each semester until after publication of its results. The Listing Rule amendments were due to become effective on 1 January 2009. The previous blackout period is within one month of publication, and was considered by HKEx to "fail to ensure that insiders do not abuse the market while in possession of unpublished price-sensitive information".