Euroclear
Mike Reece and Marije Verhelst
09 December 2025
Euroclear’s Mike Reece and Marije Verhelst sit down with Hansa Tote to discuss the last year, which included hitting €2 trillion on its Collateral Highway, reducing market fragmentation, connecting to the ECB’s ECMS, and what to expect in 2026
Image: Euroclear
Firms are required to be fluid and ever-changing in order to meet industry standards and client expectations, and Euroclear is no exception, having spent 2025 connecting with other firms while working to improve interoperability.
While the past 12 months have been transformational for the industry, from regulatory changes to the rise of AI, Euroclear has seen its own milestones. Marije Verhelst, head of product strategy and product development, collateral management and securities financing, highlights the launch of Euroclear’s Collateral Optimisation Service, developed in partnership with collateral management platform, Transcend. The service aims to provide clients with a holistic offering across their operations, strengthening liquidity management and achieving meaningful cost saving while maintaining data segregation and protection.
She also states: “It should be noted that our Collateral Highway surpassed the €2 trillion mark in mobilised collateral, which was a huge milestone this year.”
Euroclear’s Collateral Highway is a fully open, global market infrastructure that sources and mobilises across borders and time zones, providing market participants with rapid access to high-quality collateral.
Mike Reece, the firm’s newly appointed managing director, head of market liquidity, interjects, noting that it has been a ”foundational” year for Euroclear, and underlines the firm’s efforts to reduce market fragmentation while ensuring collateral efficiency in order to ease business for clients.
Reece assumed his current role in early November, a move that the firm says promoted innovation and client focus. Commenting on how his new role supports progress, he states that client focus is at the heart of everything the firm is doing in order to support their clients through key market changes.
The firm is able to leverage its internal ecosystem to ease the usage of collateral, financing and banking for clients, while looking to bring new solutions, such as tokenisation and distributed ledger technology (DLT), to market, he continues.
Making connections
Earlier this year, Euroclear connected to the European Central Bank’s (ECB’s) Eurosystem Collateral Management System (ECMS). The system works by replacing 20 separate national central bank (NCB) access points with a single, unified platform, enabling market participants to manage their collateral on a pan-European basis, streamlining operations and improving efficiency for both bilateral and triparty collateral movements.
Commenting on the connection, Verhelst states: “With ECMS now live, market participants can access a single pool of collateral across the Eurosystem, simplifying processes and facilitating cross-border investments.
“We in turn launched our Central Bank Access Service — part of the Collateral Highway — which enables clients to gain access to central bank liquidity through the ECMS using triparty. For us, this is a big development in the area of collateral management.”
Reece adds that the launch fits well with the firm’s border strategy around The Savings and Investment Union as well as T+1, as it provides an open, single point of access for the market, stating it is a “real game changer” for the industry.
Meeting demands
Providing insight into the demands of market participants, Verhelst says clients are focused on alleviating frictions, especially with T+1 looming ever closer. She indicates that there is a large area of concern surrounding what T+1 means for liquidity with securities financing trades likely shifting from T+1 to T+0, and that a shorter settlement cycle “creates a stretch on liquidity early in the morning”.
In order to mitigate this stretch, Verhelst outlines Euroclear’s attempt to help the market by improving credit efficiency in areas such as within the firm’s triparty and settlement processes. The firm intends to introduce a gating event that will attempt to synchronise opening and closing securities financing transactions (SFTs), as well as cash trades and their related SFTs in order to reduce intraday liquidity.
“That’s why alignment across the market is so important,” Reece adds, “with collateral, settlement, banking services around FX, and cash all coming together to ensure we are addressing our clients liquidity needs.”
As with any company, innovation is paramount to the success of Euroclear, and is something Reece describes as “being aware of existing and future frictions or pain points, then looking for solutions”.
He states that this is not easy, given the speed at which the industry moves with new technologies. Reece adds that the biggest forces shaping global custody and post-trade services today can be grouped into two areas: the rise of digital assets and the growing demand for open digital and data platforms; and the aim to unlock significant benefits for the whole market while preserving safety and stability.
The future
Looking towards the new year, and what the market can expect from Euroclear in 2026, Verhelst says execution is front of mind for the firm’s strategy, while also making sure it provides an optimal service for clients, either through traditional products or new digital services across the company.
For Reece, selecting the right partnerships is key. He believes the firm needs to “maintain a heightened degree of intimacy with the market at execution and strategy level”.
In his conclusion, he states that the pace of change is accelerating, and Euroclear is expected to move faster — “the level of ambition is high and we’re going to back that up with execution”.
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