Let’s Continue the ETF Success Story Together

Stephan Leithner commented on this as follows:

“Today marks 25 Years ETF trading in Europe! I met up with my colleague Stephan Kraus, CFA, the “man of the first hour” to discuss his insights from this success story – and to congratulate him!

Deutsche Börse Group was the pioneer in listing the first ETFs in April 2000. And Xetra Trading remains the leading exchange for ETFs in Europe, with a record average monthly trading volume of €28.5 billion in the first quarter of this year. For Stephan Kraus, E-T-F stands for “easy, transparent and flexible”. Key features that make the products so successful. Congratulations to the whole team on this great achievement!

A leading capital market infrastructure is more than a trading platform provider. And ETFs are a great example of how different components of our infrastructure work together to create a strong ecosystem: Many ETFs are based on indices such as DAX and STOXX. Derivatives on Eurex help ETFs to track these indices efficiently. Investors can also use derivatives to hedge their ETF positions. And thanks to Eurex Clearing, investors benefit from significantly reduced counterparty risks.

But the story goes on: Traditionally, ETFs were settled differently in each European country in complex processes, but Clearstream has developed an efficient pan-European solution to address these shortcomings. As a result, ETF trades not only from Germany, but from the entire EU are now settled through Clearstream – and today, we announced a significant reduction of our settlement fees for centrally cleared ETF transactions on Xetra to further strengthen post-trade efficiency! With our infrastructure, we have already overcome the often-lamented fragmentation of the European capital market in the settlement of ETFs.

Last but not least: ETFs play an important role in private pension provision and the mobilization of private capital in Europe, thanks to their easy accessibility, transparent structure, low costs and the ever-growing number of savings plans. And that’s really crucial to boosting our economic strength and innovation power in Europe.

Let’s continue this success story together!”