Let's say you are buying an option contract on an exchange. You don't know who is selling to you and whether they can actually pay you when the time comes. In order to solve this issue, intermediates act as a guarantor of all transactions allowing investors to treat each seller the same. This lets investors only care about price instead of "who".
I am not an expert, I only have very surface knowledge and don't know the exact chain of intermediaries for each market but I know one such guarantor is the Chicago mercantile exchange.
I am not an expert, I only have very surface knowledge and don't know the exact chain of intermediaries for each market but I know one such guarantor is the Chicago mercantile exchange.
https://www.cmegroup.com/clearing/risk-management.html