As in the case of the electricity and the CO2 markets EEX will employ an integrated method comprising trading, clearing and OTC clearing also for the coal market.
In the opinion of Dr. Wolfgang Ritschel, managing director of the Association of Ger-man coal importers, in particular the clearing resolves a growing problem in the indus-try: “The coal traders’ bilateral credit lines are exhausted more and more in the face of the rapid growth of the trading volume. For this reason EEX will ensure that there is room to manoeuvre and flexibility in trading as well as security in the settlement of transactions. The products of EEX will be launched at just the right time.“
With the help of OTC clearing on EEX the trading parties can eliminate the counter-party risk for over-the-counter transactions. Moreover, the subsequent transfer of transactions already existing today into the clearing system of EEX will also be possible.
The integration of the new products into the existing product range of EEX will enable the trading participants to benefit from a number of synergy effects. This means for ex-ample that the different futures contracts can be traded via one single access, the set-tlement both of exchange transactions and of over-the-counter transactions can be ef-fected in an integrated manner and the capital requirements for margins to be depos-ited can be minimized through of netting or, if appropriate, of cross-margining.
Dr. Albert Moser, Director of Business Development on EEX, is convinced that the flexibility of the Eurex system contributes decisively to the speedy implementation of the plans. New products are easy to implement, as Moser explains, and the settlement of the transactions with the clearing banks is very simple since Eurex has a leading po-sition in international finance. EEX already uses this IT system for futures trading in electricity and emission allowances.
At the moment, the European Energy Exchange operates a Spot and a Derivatives Market for electricity and EU emission allowances. With currently 133 trading partici-pants from 17 countries, it is the energy exchange in continental Europe with the larg-est number of trading participants and the biggest turnover. The range of services pro-vided by EEX is complemented by related services such as the integrated clearing of exchange transactions and over-the-counter transactions (OTC clearing).