Clearing house power-downs raise fears among members

Banks question CCP resilience to system outages, as debate swirls over non-default losses

The lights have never gone off at clearing houses such as LCH and Ice, but from time to time they flicker.

Regulators have counted a few dozen operational outages at central counterparties over the past year – all of them brief systems interruptions that affected banks and other users in a limited and inexpensive way.

An extended shutdown would be more damaging, though. Clearing members are starting to ask whether CCPs are sufficiently capitalised to withstand both real and potential loss