A long-awaited agreement between four of Europe’s leading clearing houses, which is set to bring about widespread competition in clearing for the first time, took a step closer to becoming reality with regulators saying they were “conceptually” satisfied with the arrangement.

The UK, Dutch and Swiss regulators sent e-mails on Monday to their local clearers: the London-based houses LCH.Clearnet and EuroCCP; the Swiss clearer SIX X-clear; and the Netherlands-based European Multilateral Clearing Facility; saying that they agreed in principle to a so-called interoperability arrangement proposed by the firms in August.