Settlement overview

Clearstream provides a single point of access to cost-effective, low-risk and highly-efficient settlement services across 59 domestic markets.

Fully-optimised, real-time settlement is particularly important in today’s environment where a premium is placed on rapid settlement and maximum liquidity; especially in the collateral management arena where the key is in delivering seamless mobility of cash and securities.

  • Our industry-leading settlement engine offers fully-optimised continuous settlement processing, providing secure and high-performance straight-through delivery versus payment (DVP) transaction processing, ensuring efficient settlement with low risk.
  • The end-to-end instruction lifecycle is available in real time without bottlenecks.
  • Clearstream ensures increased credit and collateral efficiency through the use of fully-optimised, industry-leading and real-time reporting services.
  • Clearstream offers an added-value reporting service for settlement, cash and custody information and reconciliation.

In April 2014, we extended our real-time settlement window by two hours to better cover the U.S. and Latin American business day.

This follows the extension of our real-time settlement window in 2009 which ensured improved real-time coverage for Asian and EMEA countries and resulted in significantly better deadlines, full business-day settlement coverage and faster same-day turnaround in the majority of our markets.

What real-time means to us

To us ‘real time’ is simple and straightforward. On average, instructions are processed in less than 20 seconds of receipt. This happens continuously throughout the entire settlement day, while 40,000 instructions are processed on a daily basis. Therefore, if an instruction cannot be settled, for instance through a lack of resources held by the counterparty, it will be recycled continuously in real time until settlement takes place.

The power of our systems means that fails lending can run in parallel to the settlement process, so real-time settlement processing is never interrupted. We never limit the number of settlement optimisation algorithms we run during the day - even the most complex netting algorithms involving multilateral counterparty relationships - guaranteeing that the minimum amount of collateral is required for settlement to take place. This not only increases settlement efficiency but frees up your collateral to use for other purposes.

Depending on where the customer's counterparty wishes to receive settlement, Clearstream provides internal, Bridge or external settlement.

  • Internal settlement: for transactions with counterparties in Clearstream
  • Bridge settlement: for transactions with counterparties in Euroclear Bank
  • External settlement: for transactions with counterparties outside the two ICSDs.