Margin Management Push And Self-Clearing Plans Accelerate Across Funds, New Acuiti Report Finds
purchase-side firms and proprietary trading houses are pulling more of the clearing and margining lever in-house — and a growing cohort is preparing to clear directly — as market structure shifts and new Treasury clearing rules reshape incentives, according to .
Key Takeaways
- More control of margin: 69% have taken greater control of margin calculation and payment in the past five years; another 10% plan to.
- Self-clearing interest: 12% are already direct clearing members; 44% are exploring or open to self-clearing.
- Policy catalyst: 75% cite the incoming SEC mandate to clear US Treasury cash and repo — and related cross-margining — as a key driver.
- Cloud on the rise: data warehousing, TCA, post-trade analytics, and portfolio/risk are the most commonly cloud-hosted functions.
Why Margin Is Moving Center Stage
The study charts a post-GFC evolution in which trade-side balance-sheet constraints and heavier capital rules pushed banks to be choosier about business lines — while well-capitalized providers filled gaps and took ownership of more workflows. The growth of cloud delivery has lowered the cost of insourcing, enabling firms to assume tighter oversight from front office to post-trade.
That shift is most visible in margin. A clear majority report over how margin is calculated, forecast, and posted, a response to spiky calls during recent bouts of volatility and to persistent opacity around add-ons such as concentration and volume risk.
Numbers To Know
- Margin optimisation influences venue and product choice for 74% of respondents.
- Stress-testing cadence varies widely: proprietary firms tend to run daily scenarios; many asset managers do so only on an event-driven basis.
The Self-Clearing Question: From Niche To Next
Self-clearing — joining a CCP directly while still using FCMs for broader market access — is moving from edge case to strategic option, particularly in the US. The report notes that several well-known electronic market-makers already appear on CME and FICC member rolls, and that more firms are assessing the economics as policy tailwinds build.
Among surveyed firms, 12% have already become direct clearing members; another 10% are actively exploring, and 34% are open to the idea down the road. The primary draws are cost reduction, competitive edge, and the potential to unlock cross-margining benefits as CCP programs proliferate.
What’s Driving Interest
- Regulatory push: The cash and repo is central or very significant for half of firms considering membership.
- Cross-margining: Growing links (e.g., CME–FICC) make portfolio margining across products more compelling.
But Barriers Remain
Compliance complexity is the standout hurdle. Respondents already inside the club pointed to understanding and meeting regulatory obligations as the toughest part of membership, while default-management duties and guarantee-fund exposure were viewn as comparatively manageable. Most firms also flagged the capital tied up in membership as a moderate challenge — not insignificant, but not prohibitive.
Beyond rulebooks, there’s the plumbing: building or purchaseing the technology to manage margin, collateral, reconciliations, fees, and reporting at scale. While some large players roll their own, over half of respondents still rely predominantly on manual processes for optimisation; where they do use tools, many prefer in-house builds over third-party offerings they perceive as trade-side-tilted.
Tooling Trends
- Manual to automated: Advanced optimisation remains concentrated; automation uptake is expected to rise as volumes and complexity grow.
- Third-party platforms: Interest is increasing to cut the operational burden of self-clearing and accelerate time-to-market.
- Cloud first: Data warehousing, TCA/post-trade analytics, and portfolio/risk management are leading cloud workloads.
What It Means For Market Structure
The report’s through-line is clear: purchase-side and prop firms are no longer content to be price-takers on . They want transparency into models, earlier warnings on calls, and a greater say in where collateral sits — and increasingly, they want the membership poorge that lets them control the process end-to-end. If more firms follow through, expect a measurable rebalancing of roles across CCPs, FCMs, and clients, with technology vendors stitching together the middle.
In the near term, the mandate looks set to be the accelerant, broadening participation and making cross-margining economics harder to ignore. Longer term, the direction of travel — towards real-time data, interoperable tooling, and cloud-delivered operations — points to a clearing ecosystem where speed and self-determinism are competitive advantages, not luxuries.
