Options Clearing Corporation

Options Clearing Corporation (also called "OCC") is a United States clearing house based in Chicago.  Clearing houses are used to help traders, and they make sure each trade is correctly made, or "cleared". The OCC does this "clearing" with stocks, stock options, and many things that are very much like options (called equity derivatives).  "Clearing" for stocks is very much like clearing a bank check.  The OCC provides this service to at least 14 exchanges, where stocks, options, and contracts to buy or sell copper, gold, grain, oil, and other needed supplies.  They also provide services for people and companies that need to borrow stocks.  When someone borrows a stock, they have to pay OCC some money every day.  This is the same as people who pay a bank for a loan of money.

Like all clearing houses, the OCC makes sure that nobody cheats, and they check everything to be sure that it is working.  The OCC has about $100 billion US dollars of money deposited by big banks and trading companies (or "members").  Each day, the big banks and trading companies use the OCC to trade billions of dollars worth of stocks and other equity derivatives.  In 2015, they had 4.2 billion trades.  That was the third highest in their history.

In 2011, OCC was the largest clearing house in the USA. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) are the two parts of government that watch over OCC.  Under the SEC, OCC helps with stocks and options, indexes for stocks, foreign currencies, and futures contracts. The OCC is called a "registered Derivatives Clearing Organization (DCO)" by the CFTC.  The have helped pay for schools to teach investors about trading, and they help finance advisors and companies learn answers to very difficult problems. They also teach about risk.
Leadership
OCC is run by a board of directors, and the board is mostly people who work at big banks and trading companies.  They are a utility, like a power company is a utility, but for financial things.  They are called a financial utility provider.  They make money from the big banks and trading companies they work with.
Members
Members include:
ABN AMRO
ATD
Bank of America
Bank of Montreal
Bank of New York Mellon
Barclays
BB&T
BBVA
Bloomberg
BNP Paribas
Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce
Cantor Fitzgerald
Charles Schwab
Citadel
Citigroup
Commerzbank
Credit Suisse
Daiwa
Deutsche Bank
Fidelity
Goldman Sachs
HSBC
ICAP
Industrial & Commercial Bank of China
ING
Intesa Sanpaolo
ITG
JP Morgan
Knight Capital
Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group
Mizuho Financial Group
Morgan Stanley
NASDAQ OMX
National Bank of Canada
Natixis
Nomura
Royal Bank of Canada
Royal Bank of Scotland Group
Scotiabank
Société Générale
State Street
Timber Hill
Toronto-Dominion Bank
UBS
Vanguard
Virtu Financial
Wells Fargo

References

Category:Companies based in Chicago
Category:American financial companies