LCH Brand Guidelines: An 1888 Produce Clearing House, Clearnet of Paris and SwapClear

Coffee, sugar and a City backstreet.

LCH traces its roots to the London Produce Clearing House, set up in 1888 to clear futures contracts in coffee, sugar and other soft commodities; the company describes its beginnings as a small firm working out of a City of London backstreet. English Wikipedia adds that its shares were publicly held and listed on the London Stock Exchange, and that the finance house United Dominions Trust acquired it outright in 1951. The sources used for this guide do not say how the London Produce Clearing House operated during the two world wars.

In 1971 it was renamed the International Commodities Clearing House. Ownership then passed to a consortium of six British banks — in 1980 according to Wikipedia, in 1988 according to the company. In 1992 it sold its clearing-software business to Sungard and became the London Clearing House, which the company says signalled a move beyond commodities. From 1996 its clearing members held the majority, with the London Metal Exchange, the International Petroleum Exchange and LIFFE as minority owners, Wikipedia says.

The French side has its own line. The Banque Centrale de Compensation was set up in Paris in 1969 to clear contracts on the Paris commodity markets, became a subsidiary of the futures exchange MATIF in 1990 and, in 1999, took over clearing for the Paris Bourse and MATIF under the commercial name Clearnet. After Euronext was formed in 2000, Clearnet merged with the Amsterdam and Brussels clearing houses in 2001 and took on a Lisbon branch in 2003. That year the London and Paris houses merged as LCH.Clearnet, owned by clearing members, exchanges and Euroclear, according to Wikipedia.

SwapClear, RepoClear and the open model.

A clearing house stands in the middle of a trade. LCH describes itself as a central counterparty, “a buyer to every seller and a seller to every buyer,” which sets membership standards and collects initial and variation margin, or collateral, from its members. The group today comprises LCH Ltd in London, LCH SA in Paris, SwapAgent Ltd and the holding company LCH Group Holdings, the company says.

Its services carry “Clear” names. RepoClear, for repo and bond trades, launched in 1998 according to the company, while Wikipedia gives 1999; SwapClear, for interest-rate swaps, followed in 1999, and EquityClear, for cash equities, exchange-traded funds and similar instruments, in 2001. In 2012 the group added CDSClear, for credit default swaps, and ForexClear, for foreign-exchange products. The company says SwapClear is open to buy-side clients and clears swaps in 21 currencies with maturities of up to 50 years. Wikipedia adds the commodities it clears for the London Metal Exchange and other markets. In 2017 the group set up SwapAgent, which brings processing, margining and settlement to derivatives that are not centrally cleared.

The company calls its approach an “open model”: members can clear eligible trades wherever they were executed, so that positions from several venues can be offset against one another. In 2008, when Lehman Brothers defaulted as a clearing member, LCH says SwapClear worked through its interest-rate swap portfolio of more than 66,000 trades within three weeks, with no loss to its other clearing members.

Design and documentation.

Post-trade institutions do the work that follows a trade: settlement, clearing, custody, collateral management and asset servicing. Central securities depositories, or CSDs, hold securities in book-entry form and settle transfers between accounts; international CSDs such as Euroclear Bank in Brussels and Clearstream Banking in Luxembourg do the same for bonds issued across borders; clearing houses stand between buyers and sellers; and custody banks hold assets for investors. Global Custodian noted in 2010 that this business is sometimes called the “plumbing of the financial system.”

The names can mislead. English Wikipedia points out that neither Euroclear nor Clearstream runs central counterparty clearing, despite the word in their names, which date from a time when clearing and settlement were treated as a single activity. For a designer, that makes plain service pages important: settlement, custody, collateral and fund services each tend to get their own section, written for banks, brokers and central banks rather than private investors.

Much of what these institutions publish is documentation. Clearstream’s website, for example, groups banking licences, articles of association, disclosure reports and regulatory information under the EU’s settlement and digital-resilience rules on one regulation page, alongside due-diligence questionnaires and factsheets. Rulebooks, operating manuals and annual reports sit beside those pages, so for a design system a clear type hierarchy and readable tables do much of the work.

The palettes in this guide lean on deep blue, teal and grey, set with a sans for long technical text, and the imagery stays abstract: networks, links and data rather than people or products. These are unofficial interpretations of our own, not brand colours; no logo, wordmark or document from any institution is reproduced.

The markets’ partner.

The London Stock Exchange Group took a majority stake in LCH.Clearnet in 2012, according to the company; Wikipedia dates the completion to 2013. In October 2018 Hedgeweek reported that LSEG had agreed to buy up to a further 15.1 per cent from minority shareholders, which was expected to take its holding above 80 per cent; the company’s history gives the 2018 result as 82.6 per cent. In 2016 LCH.Clearnet dropped “Clearnet” from its name and became LCH, with the line “The Markets’ Partner.” In 2020 LSEG put the LCH Group and UnaVista into a new post-trade division, and in 2023, the company says, the LCH Group became part of the new LSEG brand. Its pages now sit on LSEG’s website, and the old lch.com addresses redirect there. The same pages carry end-user notices, details of the trading venues and settlement providers LCH works with, and the LCH Group’s annual reports and financial statements.

Appointments are announced by the parent: in January 2025 The TRADE reported that LSEG had named a new chief executive of LCH Limited, promoted from the role of group head of SwapClear and Listed Rates, and noted that the LCH Group chief executive also leads LSEG Markets. LCH SA in Paris remains the group’s French clearing house, formally still the Banque Centrale de Compensation, Wikipedia says. Its members include most of the major investment banks, broker-dealers and international commodity houses, according to the same article.

For a design guide, LCH shows a clearing house that named its services as a family — SwapClear, RepoClear, EquityClear, ForexClear — and then folded its own name into a parent brand. Compare Euronext, whose Amsterdam, Brussels and Lisbon clearing businesses joined Clearnet in 2001–2003, and DTCC, the New York holding company for US clearing and settlement. For this guide we use a deep teal, a navy and a warm stone grey with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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