FUTOP Clearing Center A/S, is the screen-traded, Danish

Denmark

Denmark is a Scandinavian country in Northern Europe. The countries of Denmark and Greenland, as well as the Faroe Islands, constitute the Kingdom of Denmark . It is the southernmost of the Nordic countries, southwest of Sweden and south of Norway, and bordered to the south by Germany. Denmark...

 derivatives market that merged with the Copenhagen Stock Exchange

Copenhagen Stock Exchange

The Copenhagen Stock Exchange or CSE is an international marketplace for Danish securities, including shares, bonds, treasury bills and notes, and financial futures and options...

 in 1997, becoming a wholly owned subsidiary

Subsidiary

A subsidiary company, subsidiary, or daughter company is a company that is completely or partly owned and wholly controlled by another company that owns more than half of the subsidiary's stock. The subsidiary can be a company, corporation, or limited liability company. In some cases it is a...

 of the exchange. In 2003 CSE merged with the OMX

OMX

OMX AB is a Swedish-Finnish financial services company, formed in 2003 through a merger between OM AB and HEX plc and is now a part of the NASDAQ OMX Group since February 2008.It has two divisions, OMX Exchanges, which operates eight stock exchanges mainly in the Nordic and Baltic...

 exchanges. FUTOP issues, clears, and guarantees futures

Futures contract

In finance, a futures contract is a standardized contract between two parties to exchange a specified asset of standardized quantity and quality for a price agreed today with delivery occurring at a specified future date, the delivery date. The contracts are traded on a futures exchange...

 and options

Option (finance)

In finance, an option is a derivative financial instrument that specifies a contract between two parties for a future transaction on an asset at a reference price. The buyer of the option gains the right, but not the obligation, to engage in that transaction, while the seller incurs the...

 on shares, indices

Index (economics)

In economics and finance, an index is a statistical measure of changes in a representative group of individual data points. These data may be derived from any number of sources, including company performance, prices, productivity, and employment. Economic indices track economic health from...

, and interest rate

Interest rate

An interest rate is the rate at which interest is paid by a borrower for the use of money that they borrow from a lender. For example, a small company borrows capital from a bank to buy new assets for their business, and in return the lender receives interest at a predetermined interest rate for...

 products. FUTOP products can be traded electronically. Danmarks Nationalbank handles accounts in connection with the administration of margin requirements for trades. Net positions are calculated once a day, after which amounts are exchanged via the participants' accounts with Danmarks Nationalbank. FUTOP has outsourced most of its clearing services to Stockholmsbörsen (part of OM), but not the trade guarantee. Because market participants considered risk management at FUTOP to be so closely related to the provision of trade guarantees, risk management responsibilities were retained by FUTOP along with the trade guarantee.

External links

• Denmark Nationalbank http://www.nationalbanken.dk/DNUK/Tasks.nsf/side/FUTOP!OpenDocument