Iberclear (Central Securities Depository)

When you buy or sell shares on the Spanish stock exchange, someone has to keep track of who holds what and make sure that, at the end of the day, the money and the securities change hands correctly. That “great official ledger” of Spain is Iberclear.

It is like the land registry, but for securities: it records who owns each share or bond and closes out transactions so that no one is left without what is theirs. It is an invisible but essential piece: without a central depository, the market could not operate with trust.

Iberclear (Sociedad de Gestion de los Sistemas de Registro, Compensacion y Liquidacion de Valores, S.A.U.) is Spain's Central Securities Depository (CSD), responsible for the book-entry registration and settlement of securities admitted to trading on Spanish markets.

Its activity as a CSD is regulated by the CSDR Regulation (EU) 909/2014, on improving securities settlement and on central securities depositories, and at the national level by Ley 6/2023 (LMVSI). A CSD operates a securities settlement system and maintains the central register of book entries. In the tokenisation context, the DLT-SS and DLT-TSS arrangements under the DLT Pilot Regime Regulation (EU) 2022/858 allow these settlement and registration functions to be carried out on distributed ledger technology.