Clear Street (“Clear Street,” “the Company”), a New York-based diversified financial services firm, is pleased to announce the availability of professional clearing services for registered market makers in listed U.S. equities and options, marking the first successful entry into the professional clearing market in close to a decade.
Powered by Clear Street’s proprietary, cloud-native prime brokerage platform, the Company’s approach empowers U.S. registered market makers to gain comprehensive insights into effective strategies tailored to their needs, including global expansion and diversification into new asset classes and products. Clients benefit from Clear Street’s agility and an underlying infrastructure that supports an improved risk and margin policy model.
“Clear Street is entering the space with new technology that gives us the agility to deliver new markets and products to clients, which has historically been a challenge for incumbents,” said Kevin McCarthy, Chief Administrative Officer and Head of Clearing. “Our immediate focus is to collaborate closely with clients seeking to expand their current strategies while mitigating counterparty risk.”
“As an independent prime broker, we can prioritize client interests without the constraints of standardized capital requirements or conflicting business agendas. This autonomy grants us greater flexibility and discretion in pricing, seamless integration of new products from exchanges, enhanced customization, and alignment on risk and margin policies,” McCarthy added.
Clear Street is a member of twenty-nine (29) U.S. listed equity and options exchanges and was recently approved by the Options Clearing Corporation (OCC) to provide clearing services to registered options market makers. Clear Street has built a proprietary clearing system with the scale and reliability needed to meet the demands of today’s high-performance market-making firms.
“Clear Street’s professional clearing offering aligns with our strategic vision to utilize our cloud-native prime brokerage platform to expand into new customer segments. Our ambition is to become a multi-asset provider of clearing and financing services to a global, institutional client base,” said Chris Pento, CEO and Co-Founder. “The market is ready for a new provider focused on building technology that can scale across asset classes, client types, and geographies, and we’re looking forward to welcoming our first market-maker clients.”
The announcement follows a successful third tranche of the Company’s Series B funding in December 2023. Led by Prsym Captial, the raise increased Clear Street’s Series B to $685 million and the firm’s valuation to $2.1 billion.