The future that we see
15 September 2026
Justin Lawson sits down with Steve Everett of TMX and Fabrice Tomenko of Clearstream to discuss the challenges of collaborative market-utility building, the Bank of Canada joining CCMS and Repo 2.0, and what success looks like
Image: stock.adobe.com/Peera
Building a new market utility, such as the Canadian Collateral Management Service, requires collaboration across many participants. Was this harder than expected?
Steve Everett: I think it always takes a bit longer than expected. There has been tremendous collaboration in the Canadian market through the existing relationships we have with clients, with ourselves and Clearstream, and joining forces in that way has been incredibly helpful. But also through industry forums — the Collateral Infrastructure and Market Practices Advisory Group (CIMPA) has been a key industry forum to help coordinate the market and make sure we are all going in the same direction. Bringing a level of standardisation has been absolutely critical to the success of that.
There have been announcements about the Bank of Canada joining CCMS and Repo 2.0. What are these, and why do they matter?
Fabrice Tomenko: These announcements are highly significant. They demonstrate the commitment of both the central bank and the central counterparty, bringing the full Canadian market ecosystem into the Canadian Collateral Management Service (CCMS) and enabling participants to benefit from its capabilities. This includes optimisation and reuse — areas where Europe has already shown their importance, particularly during periods of market stress. The Bank of Canada and CCP’s decision to join CCMS confirms the Canadian market’s objective of building a more resilient repo market.
Everett: It is a significant and positive move for the market that has been very well received, both domestically and internationally. Certainly, there will be tremendous capital efficiencies unlocked across the market and it will build on the operational efficiencies that we are doing with CCMS. CCMS is the foundational layer which we will be building the clearing layer on. So everything is working in lockstep with each other, and it is going to be an incredibly exciting 12 to 18 month period for the Canadian secured funding ecosystem.
How are you seeing market change now with clients that are live on the CCMS?
Everett: We are certainly seeing quite a lot of interesting things. Number one, a secular trend towards doing a lot more earlier in the day, because CCMS starts off at 03:30. That is when activity is automatically starting, as opposed to starting at 08:00, 09:00, or 10:00. We are seeing the introduction of unlimited substitutions — so that is real-time substitutions throughout the day, with optimisation taking place roughly every 10 minutes, which is leading standards in the industry.
Moving from a world where a lot of our clients would have booked a single repo on a single security for an overnight or a week or a term, and to book a substitution, they would have had to break that trade completely. It was very operationally cumbersome, to the point now where we are seeing up to 300 lines on a repo settling in a very short order, 20 or 30 seconds, and then seeing, most importantly, those pieces of collateral being connected to the trading accounts of the clients.
In other words, we are not proliferating the concept of long boxes — this has actually proven to be fantastically important for collateral efficiency and optimisation, because unlimited substitutions are unlocked from very early in the morning until close of day.
Tomenko: We are seeing broader access to both the repo and securities lending markets. New participants are considering entering the repo market, supported by the operational efficiencies that CCMS brings to the ecosystem — a development that is also supported by the Bank of Canada.
What is next for the CCMS? Can you tell us a little bit about your future plans?
Everett: We have been focused primarily on repo and obviously the central bank and CCP — those have been really key tenets of what we have been doing. The next phase is rolling onto much more of a securities lending focus, and they will be enabled by triparty pledge, which has been announced for some time, but we will start going into development. There are a lot of exciting initiatives from Clearstream as well that will be crossing over into the Canadian market.
Tomenko: CCMS benefits from being built on the same platform we have used and further developed in Europe for more than two decades. As we develop new capabilities for the international market, we will also make them available to the Canadian market and to the other market infrastructures with which we partner.
When the market is ready, the digital asset, tokenisation, and cryptocurrency-related capabilities in our pipeline can be developed and (possibly) implemented in CCMS. The Canadian market is already looking ahead, as shown by tokenisation initiatives, and we believe that, together with TMX, we can help advance the development of digital assets in Canada.
How do you see technology and the collateral market changing over the next five years, with the increase of digital assets, tokenisation, and intraday liquidity?
Everett: CCMS in many ways has been a precursor to a lot of this because we have introduced real-time substitution into the market for the first time at scale, and thinking about repos in seconds rather than hours or days. To Fabrice's point earlier, the CCMS is a really good bridge to both the TradFi and the DeFi world, because it is able to move positions in both of those ecosystems. Therefore, bringing in what the power of tokenisation could do, in conjunction with what is happening in the TradFi space. So it is both a precursor and an enabler. But certainly one area which is going to be of real importance is cross-border mobility, which currently struggles with different market cut-off timings of cash or securities, and this is one particular area where I see tokenisation playing a much bigger role.
Tomenko: I fully agree with Steve. From Clearstream’s perspective, we already support platforms that enable collateral ownership to be transferred through tokenisation, with HQLAX being a good example.
Next to that, there is some technology evolution which is important and that we cannot disregard in the light of new AI optimisation. These new tools are giving us a little bit more efficiency in terms of calculation and optimisation, which is very important when we are talking about optimisation of collateral. A lot of triparty agents and vendors are looking into this; not with a conclusive solution now, but in light of the speed of the technology evolution. This is something that certainly will bring benefits to the market, especially in the area of optimisation and improving the pricing, evaluation, substitution, and anticipation — everything that is related to how we manage collateral in an ecosystem 2.0 or even 3.0, will definitely have an impact.
What would success look like for CCMS if we were sitting here in a year's time?
Everett: It will be that the central bank exposures are working well in the market with increased buy side activity, and with securities lending starting to ramp up within the service. From a client perspective, it is going to be that they will be optimising their collateral now, seamlessly across many depots, the central bank moving forward to a CCP, their securities lending balances, and by the time that they walk into the office, their mark-to-marks are done already. This is going to have a profoundly important effect on the entire ecosystem by bringing that level of efficiency. So that measure of success is how importantly, and how positively, it changes the lives of our clients, and how much more business they will be able to do due to their efficiency and optimisation gains.
Tomenko: From my perspective, success will mean reaching a stronger level of maturity in the use of the triparty solution, which remains relatively new for many Canadian participants. This would allow us to move into the next phase of our partnership: reducing cross-border frictions by enabling Canadian assets to be used within Clearstream’s ecosystem, and potentially connecting the different collateral pools created through our partnerships in markets such as Canada, Australia and South Africa. That is the future we envision.
Steve Everett: I think it always takes a bit longer than expected. There has been tremendous collaboration in the Canadian market through the existing relationships we have with clients, with ourselves and Clearstream, and joining forces in that way has been incredibly helpful. But also through industry forums — the Collateral Infrastructure and Market Practices Advisory Group (CIMPA) has been a key industry forum to help coordinate the market and make sure we are all going in the same direction. Bringing a level of standardisation has been absolutely critical to the success of that.
There have been announcements about the Bank of Canada joining CCMS and Repo 2.0. What are these, and why do they matter?
Fabrice Tomenko: These announcements are highly significant. They demonstrate the commitment of both the central bank and the central counterparty, bringing the full Canadian market ecosystem into the Canadian Collateral Management Service (CCMS) and enabling participants to benefit from its capabilities. This includes optimisation and reuse — areas where Europe has already shown their importance, particularly during periods of market stress. The Bank of Canada and CCP’s decision to join CCMS confirms the Canadian market’s objective of building a more resilient repo market.
Everett: It is a significant and positive move for the market that has been very well received, both domestically and internationally. Certainly, there will be tremendous capital efficiencies unlocked across the market and it will build on the operational efficiencies that we are doing with CCMS. CCMS is the foundational layer which we will be building the clearing layer on. So everything is working in lockstep with each other, and it is going to be an incredibly exciting 12 to 18 month period for the Canadian secured funding ecosystem.
How are you seeing market change now with clients that are live on the CCMS?
Everett: We are certainly seeing quite a lot of interesting things. Number one, a secular trend towards doing a lot more earlier in the day, because CCMS starts off at 03:30. That is when activity is automatically starting, as opposed to starting at 08:00, 09:00, or 10:00. We are seeing the introduction of unlimited substitutions — so that is real-time substitutions throughout the day, with optimisation taking place roughly every 10 minutes, which is leading standards in the industry.
Moving from a world where a lot of our clients would have booked a single repo on a single security for an overnight or a week or a term, and to book a substitution, they would have had to break that trade completely. It was very operationally cumbersome, to the point now where we are seeing up to 300 lines on a repo settling in a very short order, 20 or 30 seconds, and then seeing, most importantly, those pieces of collateral being connected to the trading accounts of the clients.
In other words, we are not proliferating the concept of long boxes — this has actually proven to be fantastically important for collateral efficiency and optimisation, because unlimited substitutions are unlocked from very early in the morning until close of day.
Tomenko: We are seeing broader access to both the repo and securities lending markets. New participants are considering entering the repo market, supported by the operational efficiencies that CCMS brings to the ecosystem — a development that is also supported by the Bank of Canada.
What is next for the CCMS? Can you tell us a little bit about your future plans?
Everett: We have been focused primarily on repo and obviously the central bank and CCP — those have been really key tenets of what we have been doing. The next phase is rolling onto much more of a securities lending focus, and they will be enabled by triparty pledge, which has been announced for some time, but we will start going into development. There are a lot of exciting initiatives from Clearstream as well that will be crossing over into the Canadian market.
Tomenko: CCMS benefits from being built on the same platform we have used and further developed in Europe for more than two decades. As we develop new capabilities for the international market, we will also make them available to the Canadian market and to the other market infrastructures with which we partner.
When the market is ready, the digital asset, tokenisation, and cryptocurrency-related capabilities in our pipeline can be developed and (possibly) implemented in CCMS. The Canadian market is already looking ahead, as shown by tokenisation initiatives, and we believe that, together with TMX, we can help advance the development of digital assets in Canada.
How do you see technology and the collateral market changing over the next five years, with the increase of digital assets, tokenisation, and intraday liquidity?
Everett: CCMS in many ways has been a precursor to a lot of this because we have introduced real-time substitution into the market for the first time at scale, and thinking about repos in seconds rather than hours or days. To Fabrice's point earlier, the CCMS is a really good bridge to both the TradFi and the DeFi world, because it is able to move positions in both of those ecosystems. Therefore, bringing in what the power of tokenisation could do, in conjunction with what is happening in the TradFi space. So it is both a precursor and an enabler. But certainly one area which is going to be of real importance is cross-border mobility, which currently struggles with different market cut-off timings of cash or securities, and this is one particular area where I see tokenisation playing a much bigger role.
Tomenko: I fully agree with Steve. From Clearstream’s perspective, we already support platforms that enable collateral ownership to be transferred through tokenisation, with HQLAX being a good example.
Next to that, there is some technology evolution which is important and that we cannot disregard in the light of new AI optimisation. These new tools are giving us a little bit more efficiency in terms of calculation and optimisation, which is very important when we are talking about optimisation of collateral. A lot of triparty agents and vendors are looking into this; not with a conclusive solution now, but in light of the speed of the technology evolution. This is something that certainly will bring benefits to the market, especially in the area of optimisation and improving the pricing, evaluation, substitution, and anticipation — everything that is related to how we manage collateral in an ecosystem 2.0 or even 3.0, will definitely have an impact.
What would success look like for CCMS if we were sitting here in a year's time?
Everett: It will be that the central bank exposures are working well in the market with increased buy side activity, and with securities lending starting to ramp up within the service. From a client perspective, it is going to be that they will be optimising their collateral now, seamlessly across many depots, the central bank moving forward to a CCP, their securities lending balances, and by the time that they walk into the office, their mark-to-marks are done already. This is going to have a profoundly important effect on the entire ecosystem by bringing that level of efficiency. So that measure of success is how importantly, and how positively, it changes the lives of our clients, and how much more business they will be able to do due to their efficiency and optimisation gains.
Tomenko: From my perspective, success will mean reaching a stronger level of maturity in the use of the triparty solution, which remains relatively new for many Canadian participants. This would allow us to move into the next phase of our partnership: reducing cross-border frictions by enabling Canadian assets to be used within Clearstream’s ecosystem, and potentially connecting the different collateral pools created through our partnerships in markets such as Canada, Australia and South Africa. That is the future we envision.
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