Clearing (finance) in the context of "CUSIP"

A clearing house, often written as clearinghouse, is a financial institution formed to facilitate the exchange (i.e., clearance) of payments, securities, or derivatives transactions. The clearing house stands between two clearing firms (also known as member firms or participants).

Its purpose is to reduce the risk of a member firm failing to honor its trade settlement obligations. A clearing house provides emergency lending and assists banks when they need help.

The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. (/sæks/ SAKS) is an American multinational investment bank and financial services company. Founded in 1869, Goldman Sachs is headquartered in Lower Manhattan in New York City, with regional headquarters in many international financial centers. Goldman Sachs is the largest investment bank in the world by revenue and is ranked 55th on the Fortune 500 list of the largest United States corporations by total revenue. In the Forbes Global 2000 of 2024, Goldman Sachs ranked 23rd. It is considered a systemically important financial institution by the Financial Stability Board.

Goldman Sachs offers services in investment banking (advisory for mergers and acquisitions and restructuring), securities underwriting, prime brokerage, asset management, and wealth management. It is a market maker for many types of financial products and provides clearing and custodian bank services. It operates private-equity funds and hedge funds. It structures complex and tailor-made financial products. It also owns Goldman Sachs Bank USA, a direct bank. It trades both on behalf of its clients (flow trading) and for its own account (proprietary trading). The company invests in and arranges financing for startups, and in many cases gets additional business as bookrunner when the companies launch initial public offerings.

A central clearing counterparty (CCP), also referred to as a central counterparty, is a financial market infrastructure organization that takes on counterparty credit risk between parties to a transaction and provides clearing and settlement services for trades in foreign exchange, securities, options, and derivative contracts. CCPs are highly regulated institutions that specialize in managing counterparty credit risk. An extensive overview of the academic literature can be found in Berndsen (2021).

CCPs "mutualize" (share among their members) counterparty credit risk in the markets in which they operate. A CCP reduces the settlement risks by netting offsetting transactions between multiple counterparties, by requiring collateral deposits (also called "margin deposits"), by providing independent valuation of trades and collateral, by monitoring the creditworthiness of the member firms, and in many cases, by providing a guarantee fund that can be used to cover losses that exceed a defaulting member's collateral on deposit. CCPs require a pre-set amount of collateral — referred to as ‘initial margin’ — to be posted to the CCP by each party in a transaction. The first line of defense is collateral provided by the defaulting member. CCPs typically adjust initial margin demands in response to changes in market conditions. For instance, a CCP may increase initial margin requirements in response to high price volatility. Variation margin is the second line of defense against fluctuation in the prices of securities pledged as collateral. If those prices fall, the member must deposit a corresponding amount of cash, and if those prices go up, the member may withdraw a corresponding amount of cash. This is done either on a daily basis or sometimes more frequently. For some financial products, members’ net payment obligations to or from the CCP are settled on a daily basis (or more frequently if there are large movements during the course of the day) to prevent the build-up of large exposures. The advantages of a central counterparty clearing arrangement are greater transparency of the risks, reduced processing costs, and greater certainty in cases of default by a member.Once a trade has been executed by two counterparties, it is submitted to a clearing house, which then steps between the two original traders' clearing firms and assumes the legal counterparty risk for the trade. For example, a trade between member firm A and firm B becomes two trades: A-CCP and CCP-B. This process is called novation.

A central securities depository (CSD) is a specialized financial market infrastructure organization holding securities such as shares or bonds, either in certificated or uncertificated (dematerialized) form, allowing ownership to be easily transferred through a book entry rather than by a transfer of physical certificates. This allows brokers and financial companies to hold their securities at one location where they can be available for clearing and settlement. In recent decades this has usually been done electronically, making it much faster and easier than was traditionally the case where physical certificates had to be exchanged after a trade had been completed.

In some cases these organizations also carry out centralized comparison and transaction processing such as clearing and settlement of securities transfers, securities pledges, and securities freezes.

Magnetic ink character recognition code, known in short as MICR code, is a character recognition technology used mainly by the banking industry to streamline the processing and clearance of cheques and other documents. MICR encoding, called the MICR line, is at the bottom of cheques and other vouchers and typically includes the document-type indicator, bank code, bank account number, cheque number, cheque amount (usually added after a cheque is presented for payment), and a control indicator. The format for the bank code and bank account number is country-specific.

The technology allows MICR readers to scan and read the information directly into a data-collection device. Unlike barcode and similar technologies, MICR characters can be read easily by humans. MICR encoded documents can be processed much faster and more accurately than conventional OCR encoded documents.

An International Securities Identification Number (ISIN) is a code that uniquely identifies a security globally for the purposes of facilitating clearing, reporting and settlement of trades. Its structure is defined in ISO 6166. The ISIN code is a 12-character alphanumeric code that serves for uniform identification of a security through normalization of the assigned National Number, where one exists, at trading and settlement.

The Bear Stearns Companies, Inc. was an American investment bank, securities trading, and brokerage firm that famously failed during the 2008 financial crisis and the Great Recession. After its closure, it was subsequently sold to JPMorgan Chase. The company's main business areas before its failure were capital markets, investment banking, wealth management, and global clearing services, and it was heavily involved in the subprime mortgage crisis.

In the years leading up to the failure, Bear Stearns was heavily involved in securitization and issued large amounts of asset-backed securities which were, in the case of mortgages, pioneered by Lewis Ranieri, "the father of mortgage securities." As investor losses mounted in those markets in 2006 and 2007, the company actually increased its exposure, especially to the mortgage-backed assets that were central to the subprime mortgage crisis. In March 2008, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York provided an emergency loan to try to avert a sudden collapse of the company. The company could not be saved, however, and was sold to JPMorgan Chase for $10 per share, a price far below its pre-crisis 52-week high of $133.20 per share, but not as low as the $2 per share originally agreed upon.

Settlement is the "final step in the transfer of ownership involving the physical exchange of securities or payment". After settlement, the obligations of all the parties have been discharged and the transaction is considered complete.

In the context of securities, settlement involves their delivery to the beneficiary, usually against (in simultaneous exchange for) payment of money, to fulfill contractual obligations, such as those arising under securities trades. Nowadays, settlement typically takes place in a central securities depository. In the United States, the settlement date for marketable stocks is usually 1 business day after the trade is executed, often referred to as "T+1." For listed options and government securities in the US, settlement typically occurs 1 day after trade execution. In Europe, settlement date has been adopted as 2 business days after the trade is executed. As part of performance on the delivery obligations entailed by the trade, settlement involves the delivery of securities and the corresponding payment. A number of risks arise for the parties during the settlement interval, which are managed by the process of clearing, which follows trading and precedes settlement. Clearing involves modifying those contractual obligations so as to facilitate settlement, often by netting and novation.