Industry preparation for US Treasury cash clearing “has advanced significantly” this year, though “meaningful work remains” before the 31 December 2026 deadline.
Those are high-level takeaways from the most recent industry readiness report, published this week by DTCC’s Fixed Income Clearing Corp (FICC).
The FICC report, based on a survey of full-service netting members of FICC’s Government Securities Division (GSD), found more than US$1.2 trillion of Treasury cash activity is already clearing at FICC, with an estimated US$300 billion to US$400 billion still to bring on. Almost four-fifths of GSD netting member respondents, or 79%, have the necessary account setups in place ahead of the year-end deadline.
“Firms have been actively preparing for expanded U.S. Treasury clearing requirements and are making meaningful progress toward implementation,” Laura Klimpel, managing director and head of DTCC’s Fixed Income and Financing Solutions business, said in a release.
As the incumbent central counterparty in the space, FICC clears most Treasury and repo volumes but it now competes with two newer rivals: Intercontinental Exchange’s ICE Clear Credit, which went live with Treasury clearing in February 2026, and CME Group’s CME Securities Clearing, for which the go-live date is Q3 2026, pushed back from an initial projection of Q2.
“While CME remains a committed partner with the FICC, we believe that as markets evolve in response to the SEC’s central clearing requirements, market participants will benefit from choices and options to help them find the most efficient solutions for their risk management needs,” CME Group CEO Terry Duffy said in congressional testimony on April 29, 2026.
A CME spokesperson confirmed the Q3 timetable to The DESK and declined further comment.
There has been some skepticism regarding industry readiness for Treasury clearing. In a May 22 Substack post entitled The Plumbing isn’t Ready: What the Treasury Clearing Mandate Means for Global Markets, Glenn Handley, founder and CEO of SecFin Solutions and a 30-year veteran of Barclays, Commerzbank, and HSBC, wrote that “The deadlines are fixed. The infrastructure is not.”
Handley noted that CME and ICE are positioning ‘done-away’ clearing, where a broker executes the trade but clears through a designated agent, as a competitive advantage against FICC. However, done-away clearing infrastructure is incomplete, and fragmentation of clearing models presents its own risks. “If borrowers and lenders align with different CCPs, netting efficiency collapses and collateral demands multiply,” Handley wrote.
Speaking on ISDA’s The Swap podcast in April, Nate Wuerffel, global head of market structure and head of product, global collateral at BNY, noted the importance of central clearing as a way to boost safety, resilience and liquidity in the US$31 trillion US Treasury market.
Wuerffel cited a BNY conducted earlier this year that showed 50% of market participants were very confident in their ability to meet clearing deadlines, while 41% were somewhat confident. “To me that shows there’s been good progress and the market is headed in the right direction to comply with these rules, but there’s still a lot of work to do,” he said.
Wuerffel said specific unresolved issues as of April included how to handle transactions between affiliates, how to handle the clearing of trades where the trade time zone is different from the CCP time zone, and how to set up a third party to become a clearing agent.
Tyler Wellensiek, global head of market structure at BlackRock, added on the ISDA podcast that infrastructure providers still need to complete work across electronic trading platforms, limit hubs, and settlement services.
To the question of what success looks like in July 2027, after the Treasury repo clearing deadline has passed, Wellensiek said she’s looking for little to no disruption to the participation in and functioning of the Treasury market. Wuerffel would like to see firms go beyond considering Treasury clearing just a compliance exercise, and seise the opportunity to invest in efficiency, scale, and modernised infrastructure.
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