EMIR CCP Admission Criteria: The New RTS for Clearing Members

On 8 July 2026 the European Securities and Markets Authority published its final report on the technical standards that flesh out how EU central counterparties must build their CCP admission criteria (ESMA91-1505572268-4692). The standards sit under Article 37(7) of EMIR, the participation-requirements article that Regulation (EU) 2024/2987, better known as EMIR 3, rewrote when it entered into force on 24 December 2024. For any firm that clears, or wants to clear, directly at an EU CCP, this is the document that turns a clearing house’s discretionary membership rulebook into a defined, published and documented set of elements the CCP has to weigh before it lets a member in.

The audience for this text is wider than the bank clearing desks that already hold membership. EMIR 3 opened the door to non-financial counterparties joining a CCP directly, so energy and commodity firms are reading Article 37 for the first time. Buy-side firms using sponsored access are in scope too. And the CCPs themselves have to rebuild their rulebooks and their published criteria to match. ESMA is careful to say what these RTS are: they specify the elements a CCP must consider, and they do not set the admission thresholds themselves.

The text is not yet law. ESMA will now submit the final draft RTS to the European Commission for endorsement, after which the European Parliament and the Council get their scrutiny period. That gap between a finalised standard and an adopted one is exactly when reporting and onboarding teams have room to map their evidence to the element lists, so the eventual Commission Delegated Regulation lands as a formatting exercise instead of a scramble.

Related reading: EMIR Reporting Explained, our practitioner guide to the wider EMIR reporting framework these participation rules connect to.

The EMIR 3 CCP admission criteria timeline at a glance

This is a deadline-driven file with one statutory date already missed and several still open. The operative dates:

• 27 November 2024: EMIR 3 (Regulation (EU) 2024/2987) adopted, amending EMIR, the Capital Requirements Regulation and the Money Market Funds Regulation to cut excessive exposures to third-country CCPs and improve EU clearing.
• 4 December 2024: EMIR 3 published in the Official Journal.
• 24 December 2024: EMIR 3 entered into force. The rewritten Article 37, including the new conditions on non-financial counterparties, took effect from this point.
• 9 October 2025 to 5 January 2026: ESMA public consultation on the draft RTS.
• 20 November 2025: ESMA public hearing on the draft RTS.
• 25 December 2025: the Article 37(7) deadline for ESMA to submit the draft RTS to the Commission, twelve months after entry into force.
• 8 July 2026: ESMA published its final report and final draft RTS (ESMA91-1505572268-4692), to be submitted to the Commission.
• Next: Commission endorsement as a delegated regulation, then Parliament and Council scrutiny, then Official Journal publication. If Article 5 of the final draft RTS is retained, the delegated regulation will enter into force on the twentieth day following Official Journal publication.

The gap between the 25 December 2025 mandate date and the 8 July 2026 delivery is a real one. ESMA finalised the standards after the statutory submission window, so the RTS have arrived roughly six months later than the Level 1 text asked for. That timing matters for planning, because the Level 2 detail firms need to calibrate their onboarding evidence only became stable in July 2026, while the Level 1 obligations on Article 37 have been live since December 2024.

What ESMA finalised, and what it deliberately left to the CCP

The single most useful thing to fix in your head before reading the RTS is the line ESMA draws around its own mandate. Article 37(7) told ESMA to specify the elements a CCP considers when it sets admission criteria and when it assesses whether a non-financial counterparty can meet margin and default fund calls. It did not tell ESMA to write the criteria. So the RTS give CCPs a checklist of considerations, and each CCP still decides the thresholds, the qualitative tests and the risk-based add-ons that turn those considerations into a yes or a no.

ESMA restructured the consultation draft into four substantive articles. Article 1 carries the general principles that apply to every applicant. Article 2 sets the elements for financial counterparties. Article 3 sets a separate, lighter list for non-financial counterparties. Article 4 covers sponsored models and applies to both financial and non-financial counterparties. That four-part shape answered a common consultation complaint, that a single undifferentiated list read as a bank-style template being pushed onto firms it was never designed for.

Two misreadings are worth killing early. The RTS do not require a CCP to replicate prudential supervision or to opine on whether a clearing member complies with the Capital Requirements Regulation, the Investment Firms Regulation, MiFID II or DORA. ESMA states plainly that admission standards are a component of the CCP’s own risk management, and are not a substitute for supervision by national competent authorities. The RTS also do not prescribe how a CCP gathers its evidence. Targeted legal opinions, attestations, questionnaires and operational testing are all named by ESMA as tools already in use and fully compatible with the standard, so no firm should read the RTS as banning the onboarding methods it already runs.

Where the Article 37 rewrite already bites, and where the RTS only add detail

Teams that treat the whole package as pending will misjudge their exposure. The primary-law rewrite of Article 37 has applied since EMIR 3 entered into force on 24 December 2024. The RTS are the detail layer on top, and they are still in draft. Keeping those two layers apart is the difference between a live obligation and a planning assumption.

Several Article 37 duties are already operative regardless of the RTS. A CCP must set its categories of admissible clearing members and its admission criteria on the advice of its risk committee under Article 28(3), and those criteria must be non-discriminatory, transparent and objective. Under Article 37(1a), a CCP may accept a non-financial counterparty as a clearing member only where the firm can demonstrate how it will meet margin requirements and default fund contributions, including in stressed conditions, and that non-financial counterparty may provide client clearing services only to other non-financial counterparties in its own group. The national competent authority has to review those arrangements and report annually to the supervisory college under Article 18 on the products cleared by such members, their overall exposure and any risks identified.

The ongoing obligations sit in the same in-force block. Article 37(2) requires a CCP to check compliance on a continuous basis and to run at least one comprehensive review a year of each clearing member against Article 37. Article 37(4) requires objective and transparent procedures for suspending and orderly-exiting a member that no longer qualifies. Article 37(5) lets a CCP deny access to an otherwise-qualifying applicant only where it justifies the refusal in writing and on a full risk analysis. The RTS give texture to how a CCP evidences all of this, but they did not create these duties, and a member cannot wait for the delegated regulation before its CCP starts asking Article 37 questions. The same default-management readiness that a CCP tests through a coordinated fire-drill exercise is what these admission elements try to secure at the front door.

The financial-counterparty element list every clearing member should map

Article 2 is the part a bank or investment-firm clearing member should read line by line, because it is the closest thing to a standardised onboarding questionnaire the EU has produced for CCP membership. The first limb covers financial resources and operational capacity, and it runs to thirteen elements: access to reliable credit, liquidity and, where relevant, foreign-exchange facilities; access to settlement and payment systems, with back-up arrangements where the member uses commercial bank accounts; the ability to settle margin and default fund calls on time, including intra-day calls and liquidity needs under extreme but plausible scenarios; capital adequacy and solvency indicators appropriate to the member’s legal form; capital buffers to absorb mutualised losses in a default; creditworthiness; the reliability of group financial or operational support and the group’s dependence on the member where relevant; IT compatibility with the CCP’s systems; operational resources and expertise; operational risk-management policies and business-continuity tooling; the internal risk-control framework for clearing, client-clearing and sponsorship activities where relevant; where the member clears for clients, the operational capability to supply timely and accurate client information under Article 37(3); and arrangements with third-party service providers to which the member outsources obligations towards the CCP.

ESMA names targeted legal opinions, attestations, questionnaires and operational testing as assessment methods already used by CCPs and compatible with the draft RTS. The practical read of Article 2 is codification rather than invention: it consolidates evidence requests around financial resources, operational capacity, legal enforceability and relevant risk factors into a single EU RTS structure.

The second limb of Article 2 adds the elements that are less about balance sheets and more about legal and conduct risk: evidence of the member’s financial-services authorisation or licence; its legal and financial history; its legal capacity and the enforceability of the CCP’s rules against it; conflict-of-laws exposure, which matters most for members established outside the Union; any resolution framework that applies to it; and any other relevant risk, including money-laundering and terrorist-financing risk. Two operational points sharpen this. First, creditworthiness may not rest fully on external ratings, so a member relying on a strong agency rating should expect the CCP to want audited statements, market-implied indicators or leverage and liquidity ratios alongside it. Second, for a member incorporated outside the EU, ESMA points CCPs toward a targeted legal opinion from a law firm expert in the member’s home law on questions such as default-waterfall participation, client-account segregation and collateral enforceability, while making clear the CCP is not expected to map a member’s entire legal system.

Transparency and the audit trail: the published rulebook you can be measured against

Article 1 is where the RTS change the member experience most visibly, because it forces the criteria into the open. A CCP has to publish, at least in a language customary in international finance, its admission criteria, its application procedures and timelines, the information an applicant must provide, and a summary of the risk-based rationale for any extra requirement it imposes on a particular membership category, counterparty type or product type, including the conditions under which it may restrict access. It has to keep that publication current after any change.

Behind the public page sits a documentation duty. Where a CCP limits access to certain product types or membership categories, it has to record the risk rationale, the alternatives it considered and an assessment of the proportionality of the restriction. It also has to keep evidence of the eligibility assessments it performs, including decisions to accept, conditionally accept or reject an applicant. This is the paper trail a national competent authority will pull to test whether the criteria really are fair, non-discriminatory and objective, and it pairs with the Article 37(5) requirement that a refusal be justified in writing. A prospective member that is turned away now has a firmer footing to ask for the reasoned analysis behind the decision.

One caution for members already inside. Transparency of criteria does not mean transparency of the CCP’s internal risk models. ESMA accepted the consultation point that published disclosure should not extend to confidential thresholds, limits or proprietary methodologies. So the published rulebook will tell an applicant what evidence to bring; it will not hand over the model that scores it.

Non-financial counterparties: a calibrated route built for energy and commodities

The most consequential policy choice in the final report is the decision to give non-financial counterparties their own article instead of bolting them onto the bank list. ESMA’s initial proposal applied the financial-counterparty elements to everyone with limited carve-outs. Respondents from every side warned that this risked a de facto exclusion of non-financial firms, which would push commercial hedgers back into indirect clearing and concentrate risk among a handful of bank clearing members. The final Article 3 answers that by restating the core requirement in NFC terms.

For a non-financial clearing member, Article 3 focuses on the ability to meet initial and variation margin, including intra-day margin, and default fund contributions, including under stress. It emphasises required equity capital, liquidity buffers and the capacity to mobilise funds quickly, rather than mandating a standing bank-style credit or liquidity facility that many commercial firms neither hold nor need. Where a non-financial member clears for other members of its own group, the CCP has to assess whether it could still meet margin if one of those affiliates defaulted, which targets the concentration and contagion risk inside a group clearing book without importing the full client-clearing regime that applies to banks.

The energy angle is explicit. ESMA notes that a significant number of the non-financial firms seeking direct membership trade electricity and gas and clear derivatives tied to physical commercial activity. So Article 3 swaps the financial-services authorisation test for an assessment of any licence or authorisation the firm holds under the EU wholesale energy market framework, and the RTS recitals point the CCP toward checking, where relevant, access to the physical delivery infrastructure for the commodities being cleared. Where a firm cannot reach central bank liquidity, ESMA’s list of alternatives the CCP may lean on includes higher or full collateralisation, limits on the volume the firm may clear for itself and its group, limits on eligible products, or a sponsored model. Non-financial respondents made the pointed observation that during the recent energy crisis their members met extreme margin calls without defaulting, and used that record to argue against rigid, bank-equivalent thresholds. CCP respondents separately asked ESMA to confirm that the Article 37(1) bar on a CCP being a clearing member does not catch cross-CCP transactions with a Capacity Allocation and Congestion Management central counterparty, a technical point relevant to CCPs operating in coupled power markets.

The misconception to retire here is that direct membership is now a self-certification route open to any non-financial firm that wants it. A CCP still has to satisfy itself that the firm can meet its obligations in stress, and the RTS give the CCP room to say no, or to admit on collateral and volume conditions, where that assurance is missing.

Sponsored models and the sponsor nobody should ignore

Article 4 addresses the access structure that has grown quietly at the edge of central clearing. In a sponsored model, a clearing member, sometimes marketed as a sponsored member or an ISA Direct clearing member, stays fully responsible for every financial obligation to the CCP but uses another entity, the sponsor, marketed as an agent member or clearing agent, to perform some of those functions, such as default fund contributions or default-management participation. ESMA notes these arrangements exist at two EU CCPs today and almost entirely for centrally cleared repo.

The load-bearing principle is that sponsorship does not move the liability. The sponsored clearing member remains on the hook for margin, default fund contributions and default-management obligations even if the sponsor fails, and the CCP’s rules have to state that clearly so responsibility is not quietly diluted toward the sponsor or a third party. A CCP also has to consider whether a sponsored member holds credible contingency measures, such as a back-up sponsorship arrangement or the capacity to meet its obligations alone if the sponsor drops out, and those contingency arrangements are meant to be tested by the CCP. Positions of different sponsored members, or of a sponsored member and its sponsor, are not to be netted.

ESMA had to steer between two complaints. Buy-side and CCP respondents pushed back on any mandatory standing back-up sponsor, calling it inflexible; sell-side respondents wanted firm contingency planning for a sponsor default. The landing point is that the RTS do not require a permanent back-up sponsor in every case. They require the CCP to consider whether pre-defined, operationally viable contingency arrangements exist. The CCP’s contractual review is also bounded: it is limited to the provisions that touch default management, margining, termination rights and continuity, not a general audit of the commercial deal between sponsor and sponsored member. For anyone building or buying sponsored access, the practical read is that the sponsor’s own financial and operational strength is now part of the admission analysis, and a CCP may set sponsor criteria comparable to those it applies to a member that clears for clients.

What to do before the Commission endorses the text

The scrutiny window is the preparation window. A financial clearing member can already take Article 2 and run its current onboarding pack against it, element by element, to find the gaps a CCP will probe: the intra-day liquidity story under extreme but plausible scenarios, the group-support dependency in both directions, the enforceability opinion for any non-EU entity, and the money-laundering and conduct history of group entities and key personnel. A non-financial firm eyeing direct membership can start assembling the Article 3 evidence now: equity and liquidity-buffer figures, proof it can mobilise cash fast, its wholesale energy authorisations, and its access to physical delivery infrastructure where it clears physically settled contracts.

Two cross-checks are worth building into the plan. Read the RTS against your CCP’s existing published rulebook, because Article 1 will force that rulebook to become more explicit and you want to see the delta before it is imposed. And read the elements against the wider EMIR 3 clearing changes, since the same regulation reshaped the clearing-obligation thresholds and the active-account regime that sit next to these participation rules. Firms that map admission evidence and clearing-obligation exposure together will not discover a contradiction between the two at the worst moment.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does the new RTS set the actual thresholds a CCP will use to admit me?

No. ESMA is explicit that the RTS specify the elements a CCP must reflect in its admission criteria, not the criteria themselves. Each CCP still calibrates its own quantitative thresholds, qualitative conditions and risk-based tests per membership category, counterparty type and product type. Two CCPs can weigh the same Article 2 element to a different threshold, provided both keep access fair, non-discriminatory and objective.

Are the Article 37 obligations in force now, or do I wait for the delegated regulation?

The Article 37 changes made by EMIR 3 have applied since 24 December 2024, when EMIR 3 entered into force. That includes the new conditions on admitting non-financial counterparties and the new Article 37(7) RTS mandate. Separately, the existing Article 37 duties on annual comprehensive review of members and written, risk-analysis-based reasons for refusing access remain in force. The RTS are the detail layer and remain in draft pending Commission endorsement, so the primary-law duties bind your CCP regardless of the RTS timetable.

Can a non-financial firm now join a CCP directly without a banking licence?

EMIR 3 allows it, and Article 3 of the RTS builds a calibrated route, but it is conditional. A non-financial counterparty must demonstrate it can meet margin and default fund obligations, including in stressed conditions, and a CCP may admit it on conditions such as higher or full collateralisation, volume limits or product limits. For energy and commodity firms, the CCP assesses wholesale energy market authorisations and access to physical delivery infrastructure in place of a financial-services licence.

What can a non-financial clearing member do for its own clients?

Under Article 37(1a), a non-financial counterparty acting as a clearing member may provide client clearing services only to other non-financial counterparties in the same group, and it may keep accounts at the CCP only for its own positions or those group members’ positions. Where it does clear for group affiliates, the CCP assesses whether it could still meet margin if one of those affiliates defaulted.

Does sponsorship transfer my obligations to the sponsor?

No. In a sponsored model the sponsored clearing member remains fully responsible for all financial obligations to the CCP, including if the sponsor fails. The CCP’s rules must state that clearly, positions of a sponsored member and its sponsor are not netted, and the CCP will look for credible, testable contingency arrangements. The RTS do not mandate a standing back-up sponsor in every case.

Will my CCP have to publish its admission criteria?

Yes. Article 1 requires a CCP to publish its admission criteria, application procedures and timelines, the information applicants must supply, and a summary of the risk rationale for any additional requirement or access restriction, in a language customary in international finance, and to keep it updated. It does not require disclosure of confidential internal risk models, thresholds or proprietary methodologies.

Does the CCP now have to supervise my compliance with CRR, IFR or DORA?

No. ESMA states the RTS do not require a CCP to replicate prudential supervision or to opine on a member’s compliance with the Capital Requirements Regulation, the Investment Firms Regulation, MiFID II or DORA. The CCP assesses CCP-specific risk outcomes, and supervision of sectoral compliance stays with the member’s national competent authority.

Which document should I cite as the source?

The primary source is ESMA’s Final Report on the draft RTS on CCP admission criteria elements, reference ESMA91-1505572268-4692, dated 8 July 2026, together with Article 37 of EMIR as amended by Regulation (EU) 2024/2987. Once the Commission adopts the RTS, cite the resulting Commission Delegated Regulation and its Official Journal reference.

Related Articles

• EMIR Reporting Explained – the practitioner overview of the EMIR reporting framework these participation rules sit within.
• EMIR 3 Clearing Obligation Thresholds and the Active Account Requirement – how the same regulation reshaped who has to clear and where.
• ESMA’s First Effectiveness Assessment of the EMIR Active Account Requirement – the preliminary findings and Joint Monitoring Mechanism report on direct-access clearing.
• ESMA 6th CCP Stress Test – how CCP resilience is tested across default and non-default loss scenarios.
• ESMA CCP Fire Drill and Default Simulation – what a coordinated default-management exercise asks of clearing members.
• EMIR Initial Margin Reporting – the margin obligations that admission criteria expect a member to be able to meet.

Key Takeaways

• ESMA published its final report and final draft RTS on CCP admission criteria elements (ESMA91-1505572268-4692) on 8 July 2026, under the mandate in Article 37(7) of EMIR as amended by EMIR 3.
• The RTS specify the elements a CCP must consider; they do not set the admission thresholds, which each CCP calibrates per membership category, counterparty type and product type.
• The Article 37 rewrite itself has applied since EMIR 3 entered into force on 24 December 2024. The RTS are the pending detail layer, to be submitted to the Commission after the 25 December 2025 mandate date.
• Article 2 gives financial counterparties a standardised element list covering financial resources, operational capacity, legal and conflict-of-laws risk, resolution frameworks and money-laundering risk, with creditworthiness not resting solely on external ratings.
• Article 3 builds a calibrated route for non-financial counterparties, tuned for energy and commodity firms, swapping a financial-services licence for wholesale energy authorisations and physical-delivery access, with liquidity alternatives such as full collateralisation.
• Article 4 covers sponsored models: the sponsored member keeps full liability, positions are not netted with the sponsor, and CCPs look for testable contingency arrangements without a mandatory standing back-up sponsor.
• Article 1 forces CCPs to publish their criteria, procedures and risk rationales and to document every accept, conditional-accept or reject decision, giving refused applicants a firmer basis to seek written reasons.
• Use the scrutiny window before Commission endorsement to run current onboarding evidence against the Article 1 to 4 element lists and to read the RTS alongside the EMIR 3 clearing-obligation changes.

Sources and References

• ESMA, Final Report on the Draft RTS on the elements to be considered when a CCP establishes its admission criteria and assesses the ability of NFCs acting as clearing members to meet margin requirements and default fund contributions, ESMA91-1505572268-4692, 8 July 2026: esma.europa.eu (PDF)
• ESMA news, “ESMA publishes technical standards on CCP admission criteria elements”, 8 July 2026: esma.europa.eu
• Regulation (EU) 2024/2987 (EMIR 3), amending Regulations (EU) No 648/2012, (EU) No 575/2013 and (EU) 2017/1131, OJ L, 2024/2987, 4 December 2024: eur-lex.europa.eu (CELEX 32024R2987)
• Regulation (EU) No 648/2012 (EMIR), Article 37 on participation requirements, OJ L 201, 27 July 2012: eur-lex.europa.eu (CELEX 32012R0648)
• Regulation (EU) No 1095/2010 establishing ESMA (the ESMA Regulation), Articles 10 to 14 procedure for technical standards, OJ L 331, 15 December 2010: eur-lex.europa.eu (CELEX 32010R1095)
• Regulation (EU) 2021/23 on the recovery and resolution of central counterparties, OJ L 22, 22 January 2021: eur-lex.europa.eu (CELEX 32021R0023)

Reading the RTS as an onboarding checklist

The cleanest way to use this text is to stop treating it as a policy paper and start treating it as the questionnaire your CCP will hand you. Article 2 is the bank version, Article 3 is the commercial-firm version, Article 4 is the overlay for sponsored access, and Article 1 is the promise that the CCP will show its working and keep the record. None of it is adopted yet, which is the advantage. A member that has already mapped its evidence to the elements will treat the eventual Commission Delegated Regulation as confirmation, while a member that waits will meet the same list with a deadline attached.

Last updated: July 2026

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