The System for Clearing and Settling Equities Is Antiquated. This Is About to Change.

Twenty years ago, the advent of electronic trading and resulting regulatory changes completely changed the equities industry. It opened up access for institutional and individual traders to be able to trade any stock in real-time with better execution. Trading became much more efficient and dynamic, and this led to a huge period of growth and innovation. Unfortunately, while this was all happening on the front-end, the back-end systems stayed largely static. 

In fact, today in the US, we are still using the antiquated clearing and settlement infrastructure built many decades ago. The upkeep of this infrastructure and its capital-intensive model is too expensive. With essentially no competition in 40 years, it has languished without innovation. At the same time, US equities trading businesses have faced significant revenue compression as execution fees have dropped to fractions or a penny or even free. Yet, post-trade infrastructure has remained stagnant, leaving participants to pay the proportionally high price – in costs, capital and time.

It does not have to be this way; in a static system, outside innovation is the solution. And we at Paxos are excited to drive that change.

We are upgrading clearing and settlement to meet the speed and efficiency of trading. Starting in the US with Street-side US equities settlement, Paxos has built a platform designed to alleviate market participants’ core concerns with the legacy infrastructure they rely upon today. Our solution, Paxos Settlement Service, is built with the latest technology and modern thinking about how financial infrastructure should operate. 

After obtaining No-Action relief through the third quarter of 2021 from the staff of the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), we were eager to prove that we could make settlement better by leveraging new technology. We worked closely with our first-mover clients – Credit Suisse, Instinet and Société Générale – to address their unique back-office needs to launch our pilot program early this year settling live trades. We seamlessly integrated with their systems and have been clearing and settling trades daily ever since. All our early adopters are benefitting from cost savings, unlocked capital and improved operational efficiency. These firms have seen first-hand how a modern clearing platform can operate. 

This is only the beginning of the story. In the next chapter, Paxos intends to become a fully registered clearing agency with the SEC. We’ve submitted our draft application to the SEC staff with a goal to become the second Clearing Agency actively settling US equity trades for broker-dealers in 2021. If approved, broker-dealers will have a choice of clearing agency solutions for the first time in decades. We will deliver the benefits of faster, cheaper and more capital efficient to the equities markets – and then to many other assets in the near future.

What Paxos Settlement Service Offers Participants

Paxos Settlement Service is designed to address key challenges that impact your bottom line

Bilateral settlement removes the role of an expensive central counterparty that needs to be capitalized by participants. Instead, efficient multilateral netting algorithms produce optimized bilateral settlement outcomes.

Time and cost savingsPaxos Settlement Service costs a fraction of the legacy system for participants and savings are passed on to clients directly. Paxos radically simplified the pricing model so participants have fee transparency for each market situation. Because processing a $1 trade costs the same as a $1,000 trade, Paxos charges based on processing efforts versus the notional cost of your trades. 

 

Unlocked capital. Capital trapped in the legacy infrastructure is freed and available for intraday use because participants retain ownership and control of assets. Paxos eliminates the slow batched settlement processing and delivers back settlement proceeds intraday once settlement obligations are met.  

 

Improved margin methodology that is safe, transparent, efficient, and saves participants more than 50% in capital usually required to fund a central counterparty. By leveraging the bilateral settlement model, our solution protects trades against fails with pure replacement margin. 

 

Scale and Security. The Paxos Settlement Service is built for the future. It can manage any settlement cycle at scale, meaning it will settle trades and deliver greater capital savings on your timeline. The core platform operates on a private permissioned blockchain core, ensuring a safe reliable record of assets and obligations always exists.

 

ReachPaxos is working to integrate all major trading venues to the network so wherever you trade, you’ll benefit from a better clearing alternative.

To learn more about how your business can benefit from Paxos Settlement Service, please see www.paxos.com/securities for more information or to get in touch with our business development team via [email protected].

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