LCH hires James Pearson as Head of ForexClear
The industry veteran with over 20 years of experience within the FX industry has previously been Global Head of FX Trading at RBS, where he was responsible for the trading risk, daily management, and strategic direction of the FX business.
LCH has appointed James Pearson as Head of ForexClear, the FX derivatives clearing service. Effective 1 June 2021, he will oversee its continued growth from the London office and reporting to Isabelle Girolami, CEO, LCH Ltd.
ForexClear has reported $19.1 trillion cleared across the service in 2020. In January 2021, the business went live clearing Non-Deliverable Options, a complementary product to its existing offering of non-deliverable FX forwards, deliverable FX options and deliverable FX forwards.
The industry veteran with over 20 years of experience within the FX industry has previously been Global Head of FX Trading at RBS, where he was responsible for the trading risk, daily management, and strategic direction of the FX business.
Prior to RBS, James held positions as Global Head of G10 FX Spot Trading & EMEA Head of Emerging Markets FX at Nomura and Lehman Brothers. He has also worked on FX Spot and NDF trading desks at Citi and HSBC and has sat on a number of FX industry advisory boards.
Isabelle Girolami, CEO, LCH Ltd, said: “I am delighted to welcome James to LCH as Head of ForexClear. He brings extensive experience of trading FX and leading global teams. He will be instrumental in driving continued growth and innovation at ForexClear, with a focus on expanding the deliverable FX and client clearing franchises. I look forward to working with him to deliver more innovations and efficiencies to our customers and the wider market.”
James Pearson, Head of ForexClear, said: “Thanks to the risk management benefits and the efficiencies of clearing, there is a great opportunity for even more participants to benefit from access to ForexClear. I am excited to be joining LCH and working with the team to further develop this rapidly growing service.”
The group of multi-asset clearing houses, LCH, operates an open access model, offering a choice of execution venues, delivering choice and efficiencies to the marketplace.
With clearing houses incorporated in the UK and France and with offices in the United States and the Asia Pacific region, LCH offers clearing services across asset classes including OTC and listed rates; CDS and FX; fixed income; commodities; cash equities and equity derivatives.
The non-cleared derivatives market goes through LCH SwapAgent, a service that extends the efficiencies and infrastructure of clearing to the market, without acting as a central counterparty.
In 2018. London Stock Exchange Group increased its stake in LCH Group to 82.6%. The acquisition of an additional 14.6% from certain minority shareholders cost LSEG an aggregate amount of €424.5m (£382.1m at the time).
Baton Systems has recently integrated with LCH for automating the end-to-end collateral workflow for participants in the derivatives markets.
This will enable Baton’s clients to hold manage their collateral at LCH using the Baton platform. JP Morgan is expected to be one of the first clients to be managed within this workflow.
Baton uses a distributed ledger system to synchronise and deliver on-demand asset management and asset moves. This is a leap forward in the old school management of collateral through FX platforms as it removes the need for managing margin requirements on both sides which usually leads to a situation when one end of the deal is mired in issues.
