Oslo Børs Plans Clearinghouse

Norway’s stock exchange plans to develop its own clearinghouse for share trades, becoming the latest European market to enter the lucrative clearing market in an effort to prop up profits and address investor concerns over counterparty risk.

Oslo Børs ASA has no mechanism for clearing share trades — the steps that fall between committing to a trade and settling it — and will launch the new system in the first quarter of 2010. The service will be provided by Oslo Clearing, a division of the exchange that currently clears derivative trades.

Oslo Børs is Europe’s seventh-biggest market by volume of shares traded, according to Thomson Reuters. Like its peers around Europe, the exchange is under pressure from alternative trading venues that offer low-cost trading of Norwegian stocks, reports online.wsj.com.

Oslo Børs ASA was founded in 1819 and offers the only regulated markets for securities trading in Norway today. 

Read more on www.oslobors.no