Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) has announced that ICE Clear Credit has introduced clearing for South Africa credit default swap (CDS) instruments for dealer to dealer and client clearing.

ICE Clear Credit is the first to clear South Africa sovereign CDS, which are constituents of the Markit CDX Emerging Markets Index Series, also cleared by ICE.

“We are pleased to continue to add to our slate of sovereign CDS instruments which brings additional transparency and stability to the global credit derivatives market,” said ICE Clear Credit President Stan Ivanov.

“By expanding our sovereign CDS offering, we are expanding portfolio margining benefits and increased capital efficiencies,” he said.

ICE was the first to launch clearing for sovereign CDS in 2011 and since then has cleared more than $680bn in gross notional amount in sovereign CDS instruments.

Buyside clearing for sovereign CDS has seen strong growth totaling $3.6bn so far in 2014 – up from $47m for the full year 2013.

With these additional instruments, ICE Clear Credit now clears seven sovereign CDS names: Brazil, Hungary, Mexico, Russia, South Africa, Turkey and Venezuela.

Additionally, ICE Clear Europe clears four sovereign CDS names: Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain.
ICE’s CDS clearing houses clear more than 500 single name and index CDS instruments based on corporate and sovereign debt.

ICE launched the world’s first CDS clearing house in 2009 and has cleared more than $58tr in gross notional amount of CDS, with open interest of approximately $1.6tr.