With the U.K. and EU having recently separated, concerns about cross-border equivalence for trading and clearing venues have come to the fore. The clock is ticking down, since a temporary 18-month equivalence for U.K. clearing houses will end in June 2022. People are worried that the European Commission in Brussels may try to force banks to move all clearing of euro-denominated derivatives from London to the Eurozone, which would be too much for EU clearing houses to process. 

Brendan Bradley had a front row seat for the major exchange battles between open outcry trading and electronic trading after starting at the London International Financial Futures Exchange (LIFFE) in the 1980s and then moving to DTB in the mid-1990s. While there he saw the German Bund contract battle that shocked the global derivatives trading world and then later witnessed the competition between Eurex and the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT) that he said ultimately led to the global leading exchange’s demise.