Tearing up the market: FCMs hail new compression techniques

Advances by vendors and increased competition set to unlock more trades for tear-ups

Banks sometimes seem less interested in putting on new swaps trades these days than finding ways to clean up old ones.

Compression has been hailed as the saviour of the cleared interest rates derivatives market for its ability to achieve staggering reductions in banks’ notional exposures to central counterparties. So-called risk-less compression – the tearing up of offsettable trades without any change in net risk – already takes place daily on an industrial scale within clearing houses