MarkitServ announces start of same-day CDS clearing service

MarkitServ, a trade processing business owned jointly by Markit and the DTCC, has announced that it has begun a service which allows interdealer credit default swaps to be cleared in “close to” real time. This marks a change from the way clearing has taken place to date, where dealers send their trades to be cleared in weekly batches. To date, clearing of credit default swap contracts has been limited for the most part to trades between dealers.

MarkitServ says that Deutsche Bank, JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley used its new service last week to match and route CDS trades for clearing the same day. MarkitServ is not itself a clearing house, but rather provides the means of transmitting information about trades. The interdealer contracts were cleared on Ice Clear Credit, the Ice US clearing platform.