Clarus Financial Technology

At the end of March, clearing houses published their Q1 2026 CPMI-IOSCO Quantitative Disclosures. This blog focuses on cleared IM for rates swaps, credit derivatives (CRD) and exchange-traded derivatives (ETD) together with a sample of the other disclosures.

This blog looks at Q1 2026 volumes of US-reported compression of cleared “core” rate swaps (meaning OIS, fixed float IRS, and basis swaps). Q1 2026 saw cleared core swap compression volumes of $56 trillion ($49.7 trillion OIS, $5.6 trillion IRS, and $0.5 trillion basis swaps) – up 43% year-on-year (YoY).

Capitolis has launched multilateral FX initial margin optimization (IMO) runs, taking on the long-standing FX IMO services of LSEG and OSTTRA. Word of the launch came in while I was working on this update on Clarus volumes related to FX IMO. The successful entrance of new vendors always adds interesting new angles to this type of research. All data are sourced from SDRView and CCPView. In Q1 2026, FX IMO runs generated $924 billion notional of deliverable pair NDF trades – up 13% YoY.

This blog covers credit derivatives (CRD) trading volumes in March 2026, both at CCPs and as reported in the US. We sourced the charts and statistics from CCPView, SDRView and SBSDRView. Credit default index swap volumes saw big year-on-year (YoY) increases in March 2026 from both CCPs and SDRs: USD CDX by 46 and 44 percent respectively. EUR iTraxx by 51 and 68 percent respectively. JPY iTraxx by 9.8 and 29.4 percent respectively.

This blog give an update on swap clearing broker concentration risk and asks whether the recent increase in the number of swap FCMs heralds an improvement. At the end of Q1 2025: Though unshackled by bank leverage and capital ratios, the eleven new entrant broker-based swap Swap clearing brokers (CBs) which led to the increase in swap FCM count, are not large enough to offer porting capacity to alleviate swap CB concentration risk.

This blog reviews Q1 2026 US SBSDR-reported OTC equity derivatives volumes – focusing on total return swaps (TRS) on the top five currencies – USD, EUR, JPY, GBP, CNY – which were 88 percent of the volume. Q1 2026 total SBSDR-reported notional volumes of equity TRS were as follows: USD TRS were up 96 percent year-on-year (YoY) to $3.38 trillion. EUR TRS were up 62 percent YoY to $926 billion. JPY TRS were up 95 percent YoY to $432 billion. GBP TRS were up 66 percent YoY to $423 billion.

This post continues our quarterly strikes analysis of USD swaptions, which are typically 50 percent or more of swaptions volumes in all currencies. We use SDRView data, which captures OTC derivatives trades reported by US financial firms to US SDRs. In Q1 2025: SDR-reported USD swaptions package notional executed was up 14.1 percent year-on-year (YoY) despite lower volatility YoY in underlying SOFR swap rates.

This blog is the first edition of what will become a regular quarterly blog on competition between rates derivatives exchanges and CCPs measured by market share of trade notional cleared. In Q1 2026, the exchanges and CCPs market shares of the more competitive cleared derivatives products were as follows. EUR swaps: Eurex’s share increased to 13.2 percent (to LCH’s 86.8 percent) – up 2.6 percent year-on-year (YoY). This was partly driven by the Active Account Requirement (AAR) go live in June 2025.

Today we look at issuer names most actively traded based on single-name credit default swap (CDS) trades reported to US SEC Securities Based Swap Data Repositories (SBSDRs) in March 2026. This follows on from the prior similar blog covering September 2025, as we follow the natural CDS volume peaks in March and September. We rank SBSDR reported names by count instead of notional, given the understatement of notional amounts due to the $5 million notional trade cap.

This blog covers the volumes of FX derivatives (FXD) in Q1 2026, following on from our prior blog on Q4 2025 FXD volumes. Q1 2026 saw record notional volumes for all five cleared FXD products (non-deliverable FX forwards (NDFs), FX options, FX forwards, non-deliverable FX options (NDOs), and spot FX) and for SDR-reported NDFs and FX options. Cleared NDFs grew 40 percent year-on-year (YoY) and 23 percent quarter-on-quarter (QoQ) to reach $6.63 trillion.