The European Securities and Markets Authority ESMA) published the results of its first EU-wide stress test exercise regarding Central counterparties (CCPs). The exercise is aimed at assessing the resilience and safety of the European CCP sector as well as to identify possible vulnerabilities. The results of the test shows that the system of EU CCPs can overall be assessed as resilient to the stress scenarios used to model extreme but plausible market developments. ESMA’s stress test solely focused on the counterparty credit risk which CCPs would face as a result of multiple clearing member (CM) defaults and simultaneous market price shocks. Being the first EU-wide stress test exercise for CCPs, ESMA decided to focus on the counterparty credit risk aspects of CCPs and leave additional risk dimensions for future exercises. In addition, ESMA also issued recommendations on how to improve CCPs’ internal methodologies. ESMA tested the resilience of 17 European CCPs. These CCPs held over €150bn worth of default resources with more than 900 CMs Union-wide. ESMA tested CCPs resources using combinations of CM default and market stress scenarios. The results show that CCPs’ resources were sufficient to cover losses resulting from the default of the top-2 EU-wide CM groups combined with historical and hypothetical market stress scenarios.