Good afternoon and welcome to the ECB press conference. I'm joined here on stage by President Lagarde and by Vice President Degindos. And my name is Wolfgang Preussel. As always, this is a hybrid press conference. So for the online participants, I would ask them to turn on their camera and their microphones if they wish to ask questions. And with that, I turn over to President Lagarde. Please. Thank you very much and good afternoon. The Vice President and I welcome you to our press conference. The inflation outlook continues to be too high and for too long. In light of the ongoing high inflation pressures, the governing council today decided to raise the three key ECB interest rates by 25 basis points. Overall, the incoming information broadly supports the assessment of the medium-term inflation outlook that we formed at our previous meeting. Headline inflation has declined over recent months, but underlying price pressures remain strong. At the same time, our past rate increases are being transmitted forcefully to euro area financing and monetary conditions with the lags and strength of transmission to the real economy remain uncertain. Our future decisions will ensure that the policy rates will be brought to levels sufficiently restrictive to achieve a timely return of inflation to our 2% medium-term target and will be kept at those levels for as long as necessary. We will continue to follow a data-dependent approach to determining the appropriate level and duration of restrictions. In particular, our policy rate decisions will continue to be based on our assessment of the inflation outlook in light of the incoming economic and financial data, the dynamics of underlying inflation and the strength of monetary policy transmission. The key ECB interest rates remain our primary tool for setting the monetary policy stance. In parallel, we will keep reducing the Euro Systems Asset Purchase Program portfolio at a measured and predictable pace. In line with these principles, the governing council expects to discontinue the reinvestments under the APP as of July 2023. The decisions taken today are set out in a press release that is available on our website. And I will now outline in more details how we see the economy and inflation developing and will then explain our assessment of financial and monetary conditions. Looking at the economic activity, the Euro area economy grew by 0.1% in the first quarter of 2023, according to Eurostat preliminary flash estimate. Lower energy prices, the easing of supply bottlenecks, and fiscal policy support for firms and households have contributed to the resilience of the economy. At the same time, private domestic demand, especially consumption, is likely to have remained weak. Business and consumer confidence have recovered steadily in recent months, but remain weaker than before Russia's unjustified war against Ukraine and its people. We see a divergence across sectors of the economy. The manufacturing sector is working through a backlog of orders, but its prospects are worsening. The services sector is growing more strongly, especially owing to the reopening of the economy. Household incomes are benefiting from the strength of the labor market, with the unemployment rate falling to a new historical low of 6.5% in March. Employment has continued to grow, and total hours worked exceed pre-pandemic levels. At the same time, the average number of hours worked remains somewhat below its pre-pandemic level, and its recovery has stalled since mid-2022. As the energy crisis fades, governments should roll back the related support measures promptly and in a concerted manner to avoid driving up medium-term inflationary pressures, which would call for a stronger monetary policy response. Fiscal policies should be oriented towards making our economy more productive and gradually bringing down high public debt. Policies to enhance the euro area's supply capacity, especially in the energy sector, can also help reduce price pressures in the medium term. In this regard, we welcome the publication of the European Commission's legislative proposals for the reform of the EU's Economic Governance Framework, which should be concluded soon. Turning now to inflation. According to Eurostat's flash estimate, inflation was at 7% in April, after having dropped from 8.5% in February down to 6.9% in March. While base effects led to some increase in energy price inflation from minus 0.9% in March to plus 2.5% in April, the rate stands far below those recorded after the start of Russia's war against Ukraine. Food price inflation remains elevated. However, standing at 13.6% in April after 15.5% in March. Price pressures remain strong. Inflation, excluding energy and food, was 5.6% in April, having edged down slightly compared with March to return to its February level. Non-energy industrial goods inflation fell to 6.2% in April, from 6.6% in March, when it declined for the first time in several months. But services inflation increased to 5.2% in April from 5.1% in March. Inflation is still being pushed up by the gradual pass through of past energy cost increases and supply bottlenecks. In services especially, it is still being pushed higher also by pent-up demand from the reopening of the economy and by rising wages. The information available up to March suggests that indicators of underlying inflation remain high. Wage pressures have strengthened further as employees in the context of a robust labor market recoup some of the purchasing power they have lost as a result of high inflation. Moreover, in some sectors, firms have been able to increase their profit margins on the back of mismatches between supply and demand and the uncertainty created by high and volatile inflation. Although most measures of longer-term inflation expectations currently stand at around 2%, some indicators have edged up and warrant continued monitoring. Let us now look at our risk assessment. Renewed financial market tensions, if persistent, would pose a downside risk to the outlook for growth as they could tighten broader credit conditions more strongly than expected and dampen confidence. Russia's war against Ukraine also continues to be a significant downside risk to the economy. However, the recent reversal of past adverse supply shocks, if sustained, could spur confidence and support higher growth than currently expected. The continued resilience of the labor market by bolstering household confidence and spending could also lead to higher growth than anticipated. There are still significant upside risks to the inflation outlook. These include existing pipeline pressures that could send retail prices higher than expected in the near term. Moreover, Russia's war against Ukraine could again push up the costs of energy and food. A lasting rise in inflation expectations above our target or higher than anticipated increases in wages or profit margins could also drive inflation higher including over the medium term. Recent negotiated wage agreements have added to the upside risks to inflation, especially if profit margins remain high. The downside risks include renewed financial market tensions which could bring inflation down faster than projected. Weaker demand due, for example, to a more marked slowing of bank lending or a stronger transmission of monetary policy would also lead to lower price pressures than currently anticipated, especially over the medium term. So let's look at the financial and monetary conditions. The euro area banking sector has proved resilient in the face of the financial market tensions that arose ahead of our last meeting. Our policy rate increases are being transmitted strongly to risk-free interest rates and to the financing conditions for firms, households, and banks. For firms and households, loan growth has weakened owing to higher borrowing rates, tighter credit supply conditions, and lower demand. Our latest bank lending survey reported a tightening of overall credit standards which was stronger than banks had expected in the previous round and suggests that lending may weaken further. Weak lending has meant that money growth has also continued to decline. Summing up, the inflation outlook continues to be too high for too long. In light of the ongoing high inflation pressures, the governing council today decided to raise the three key ECB interest rates by 25 basis points. Overall, the incoming information broadly supports the assessment of the medium-term inflation outlook that we formed at our previous meeting. Headline inflation has declined over a recent month, but underlying price pressures remain strong. At the same time, our past rate increases are being transmitted forcefully to euro area financing and monetary conditions while the lag and strength of transmission to the real economy remain uncertain. Our future decisions will ensure that the policy rates will be brought to levels sufficiently restrictive to achieve a timely return of inflation to our 2% medium-term target and will be kept at those levels for as long as necessary. We will continue to follow a data-dependent approach to determining the appropriate level and duration of restriction. In particular, our policy rate decisions will continue to be based on our assessment of the inflation outlook in light of the incoming economic and financial data, the dynamics of underlying inflation, and the strength of monetary policy transmission. In any case, we stand ready to adjust all of our instruments within our mandate to ensure that inflation returns to our medium-term target and to preserve the smooth functioning of monetary policy transmission. We are now ready to take your questions. Thank you, President Lagarde. And the first question goes to Annette Weissbach from CNBC. Annette, please. Thank you very much, President Lagarde. I have, of course, two questions. My first question would be on the rationale behind the reduced pace in the interest rate hike of 25 basis points. So why did you come up with that? And my second question goes to the US regional lender banking crisis, which isn't over yet. So how concerned are you about potential spillover effects to the euro area? Thank you. Well, thank you for your question. I will take the first, and maybe I will ask my colleague and friend, Vice President Luiz de Gindos, to address the second one. So let me tell you a little bit about the mood in the room of the governing council. I would characterize the mood as determined. All governors are determined to fight inflation, tame inflation and return it to 2% medium term. And we all concluded, as you have seen, that the inflation outlook is too high and has been so for too long. I would say then that the mood was very focused and yet it is an in-between projection governing council meeting.  And obviously, one case in point is the bank lending survey that you all received or saw on Tuesday when it was published and which contains a lot of intelligence and information about the intention and the comparison between the lending practices and standards with what was expected by the banks. And I'm happy to come back to that later. But it explains, obviously, the decision that we made for this 25 basis point increase. I think in terms of method, we were method dependent in many ways, just as we are data dependent because we have articulated the reaction function of our monetary policy decisions with the three key elements of the inflation outlook informed by the financial and economic data, the underlying inflation and the strength of monetary policy transmission. So we checked all the data that we had against these three criteria. And as is always the case at the governing council meeting, there was a variety of views expressed. And I think that it's fair to say that everybody agreed that increasing rate was necessary. That second, we are not pausing. That's very clear. Third, we know that we have more ground to cover on the basis of the baseline that we had which is still guiding us until we have our next projection exercise and on the basis of the data that we have received in the course of the last few days and that we brought together during the meeting. So I think the ultimate balancing act which received almost unanimous support and that is reflected in the monetary policy statement in front of you was really predicated on the methods, the data we received, the understanding that where we are is totally consistent with the baseline that we had for the outlook last time around. Remember at the last March meeting, that's what I said. And second, that underlying inflation is still high. And third, informed by the bank lending survey and the data that we have concerning interest rates which is a little bit outdated because it goes back to February, the transmission of our monetary policy is working at least to the financing leg and we're not yet certain about the next leg which is transmission from banks to the real economy. So it's on the basis of all that, that we made our decision. Now that we have increased rates significantly and sometimes by very large increments, I hope assessing, not assessing but establishing absolute credibility on our determination, it was sensible in view of what I have told you to return to a more standard increment with the understanding that based on the information we have today, we have more ground to cover and we are not pausing. That's extremely clear. Good afternoon. Turning to your second question, I think that we should start by a consideration. If you look at the characteristics of the US banks that are running through difficulties, I think that there are some common features. The first one is that they are medium-sized, regional, they share a very concrete and very idiosyncratic business model and they are quite open to interest rate risks. They are vulnerable to an increase in yields. And I think that this model, this situation is not extrapolatable to the European banking industry. Well, I will not repeat what we have said many times. European banks are resilient at the level of capital, the level of liquidity, the quality of the liquid assets. But I think that simultaneously we have to remember that an increase in interest rates in yields is positive for the European banks because the increase in margins outweighs the potential losses that this increase in yields could cause in fixing portfolios. But I think that is quite clear that there is no space for complacency. One of the things that we have been all of us surprised is about how rapidly a bank bank can take place and how rapidly a bank can be emptied. And I think that this is the combination of new factors. The first one is digital banking and the second one is social networks. And the combination of both have even rise to a new situation. And I think that supervisors and regulators, we have to bear in mind that new framework because we believe that this is going to be key in the near future. Thank you, President, Vice President. The next question goes to Francesco Canepa of Reuters. Francesco, please. Thank you, Francesco Canepa, Reuters. So my first question is about whether anyone at the meeting insisted on a larger rate hike or on a clearer commitment to more hikes. You just hinted at that by talking about ground to cover, but it wasn't quite as explicit as it was back in the winter when you were talking about steady pace and several rate hikes. Second question is about something you just said, which is, again, that you had more ground to cover. Would you say that we are still in the middle of the journey or towards the end in the home stretch? Thank you. I'm tempted to remind you of the Emerson quote. It's not so much the destination that matters, but the journey. And we are on a journey, okay? And we are not pausing. And under present circumstances and based on what we have, which is the baseline of March, we know that we have more ground to cover, okay? And there is a clear reference to that if you look carefully, and I know you have because you do that very well. But in the second paragraph of the Monetary Policy Statement, we explicitly refer to that by saying that our future decisions will ensure that the policy rates will be brought to levels sufficiently restrictive to achieve a timely return of inflation to our 2% medium-term target and will be kept at those levels for as long as necessary. We have covered a lot of ground in the last nine months, right? Moving from minus 50 basis points to plus 300 basis points. We are continuing this hiking process. As I said, this is a journey. We have not arrived yet. As to, you know, the exact amount of, you know, by how much do we increase rates? As I said in my introduction in the response to the first questions, there was a variety of views. Some governors suggested that maybe 50 was appropriate. Others also believed that 25 was appropriate. In here, anybody suggest that zero would be appropriate. So that confirms to you that this is a hiking journey that we are on and it will continue to be so. But at the end of the deliberations and having had a chance to confront our views and to, you know, answer the questions and to really sort of put everything in perspective, there was a general, very strong consensus behind the decision that you have in front of you. Thank you, Madame Lagarde. And the next question is for Jana Rando of Bloomberg News. Thank you. Morning. Good afternoon. I would like to invite you to elaborate a little bit more on your definition of sufficiently restrictive. The IMF had a view the other day, seeing the terminal rate at 3.75%, a lot of economists do that as well. Would that be something given the inflation outlook we have at the moment that would be in the ballpark of sufficiently restrictive? The other question I have is that at the last meeting you had a little bit of a debate about overtightening and having to reverse course and I'm wondering whether that discussion continued this time and whether you would actually be worried that the scenario might be interpreted as a policy mistake. Thank you. Well, thank you. Thank you very much. I don't have a magic number of what constitutes open quote sufficiently restrictive end of quote. I think that the honest answer is we will know what that is when we get there and we are in the process of moving in that direction. I think what's important is to understand what it means to have restrictive rates and to be in restrictive territory and I think the best example is to see whether the rate decisions that we make, the rate increases that we decide are actually having an impact on the economic actors and when we look at the bank lending survey in particular we look at the interest rates and the pace at which it has increased in the last few months. It is obviously the fact that interest rate decisions that we made and the interest rates level where we are are having an effect. Is it a sufficient effect yet? We don't know because we are not seeing the transmission at this point in time into what I call the second leg of the economy which is the real activity which then has an impact on prices and then reduces inflation. So full cycle we are not seeing yet. We are seeing inflation coming down, don't get me wrong, because headline is coming down as a result of energy prices having coming down significantly as a result of the easing of bottlenecks but we are not yet seeing the complete impact that we desire in order to arrive at the 2% medium term that constitutes our target. We are very attentive, we look at that as you know, it's one of the three components that we look at, the inflation outlook, but it is restrictive, no question about it, is it sufficiently restrictive? Not yet. Thank you, thank you President Lagarde and the next question goes to Martin Arnold of the Financial Times. Martin, please. Thank you, hello President Lagarde. I have two questions for you. The first one is on the decision to accelerate the pace of shrinking the bond portfolio at the ECB. Does that mean now that you're stopping all reinvestments in the APP, does that mean that you plan to reduce the APP to zero eventually? And the second question that I have is was this decision part of a compromise deal to convince those arguing for a 50 basis point move to accept a 25 basis point move in return for accelerating the pace of shrinking your balance sheet. Thank you. Thank you very much Martin for this sort of double question on the same issue of the APP. Well I would say number one, we made the decision but the decision specifically says we expect. So we expect to let the APP run off as time goes by and in answer to your question about do we go to zero, if we do then it's going to take the next 15 years so I don't think I'll be around for that. I know I won't and I'm not sure that you will be around but the ultimate perspective is that one as we consider things today. You know we've decided to expect the effectiveness of that decision as of July, saving a little bit of optionality just in case simply because we have seen that the partial reinvestment that we decided back in that has been effective since March has actually run very smoothly and has been well absorbed by markets. So we don't see any point in not accelerating the move because there are valid reasons for that. Lower the amount of excess liquidity, compliments our policy rate increases, reduce the side effect of a large balance sheet. All of that completely justifies the fact that the APP is let to run off gradually over the course of time which will be an average 25 billion per month not reinvested roughly. But as I said to run the whole APP program to zero it will take 12 to 15 years given the maturities of what we have. I would just reserve one thing because we discussed it during the governing council and it's not reflected in the monetary policy statement. As you know we have adopted a tilting approach to our investment policy of the APP and in particular for the corporate bonds which are the prime targets of that tilting in order to privilege those corporates that have a good environmental footprint that have a transition plan and disclose all the appropriate information about their plans.  There will be no basis for that. So I think the jury is out as to how we can continue to deliver on our Paris Agreement compliant investment reinvestment program without the reinvestment phase and how do we address that which is something that we agreed we would take into account and consider to see how we respond to that. Was it a deal? No. I think there was a general view that that was the right move completely sensible legitimate at this point in time given the market absorption. I think some might have preferred to wait until the June meeting to announce it given that it's effective as of the 1st of July but you know with the principle of predictability that we had agreed in the first place we thought it was just better off to just announce it with reserving a little optionality on the side. Thank you President Lagarde and the next question goes to Vick of BFM TV, French television. Good afternoon Mrs. Lagarde about the last banking landing survey is there a target for bank lending or limits in credit tightening? How do you monitor these indicators? And second question you said recently in relation to bank failures on the credit risk case that you really need to measure what comes out of this financial event so what are the indicators that you're looking at would you say that there is a banking crisis what's your view of what's happening there in the banking system? Thank you. Yeah on the you know we know of one and only one target and this is our medium term target 2%. That's what is riveting our attention. But of course the bank lending survey that we receive on a quarterly basis informs us about the tightening of credit to the economy and it also informs us about what the banks assess will be or will not be the tightening. And it's quite a sophisticated survey which is really for information intelligence anticipation of the credit tightening now and the credit tightening going forward. It's also illustrative of the demand and that's an interesting point because in the BLS the demand from corporates is really really down. So that's you know learning that we take which indicates that our interest rate policies is beginning to have an impact because when asked the corporates say and we had the corporate survey that was conducted they say it's the interest rates. It's not that you know we don't want to invest but the interest rates are pretty high and that leads me to the restrictive territory or not. Yes we are in restrictive territory because if that is the response of corporates then it shows that this work. You know on Credit Suisse I think I'll say a few words and then I'll ask a colleague Mr. Dugindos to also address that but number one it was addressed very swiftly. The Swiss authorities maybe did not have many choices and it was very specific and probably a long lasting issue that was lingering and had been lingering for a long time. So I certainly would not draw the conclusion that the merger between UBS and Credit Suisse to be decided is an indication of the financial crisis far from it. But we are learning. I think that we also learned the value of having rules and the ability we had to come out very quickly on the pecking order of creditors actually mattered a lot and I think that we can also take a bit of learning from that. When creditors, investors know exactly who is going to bear the brunt of outstanding liabilities and a situation of insolvency it just helps and we did that. I'm glad we did. Well just to add that on the question about the indicators that we consider that we look at well we have a range of indicators. For instance you know equity prices, bank bonds, the spreads, the evolution of deposits and we have not seen the kind of situations that happened in other jurisdictions. So we had let's say a sort of increase of tensions after the events in the US with Silicon Valley and with Credit Suisse. In other words the situation has been quite calm. So we are continuously looking at those indicators but clearly now the conclusion is that the European banking industry has been clearly performing the American one in terms of the tension included in this kind of indicators and the potential stress in financial markets. Thank you Vice President President and turning to our online participants now I would like to give the floor to Francesco Nilfole of Milano Finanza. Francesco please. Thank you, good afternoon. President Lagarde can you explain a little bit more how you reconcile your data dependency with the pledge? Excuse us, can you repeat because we missed a few questions? Can I explain what? Can you explain how you reconcile your data dependency with the pledge of doing more in the future? Can you explain a little bit contradictory like a forward guidance without a forward guidance? Maybe you can explain it a little bit more. Secondly on core inflation. No doubt it is important to monitor core inflation but the ECB's target as you have said just now is headline inflation at 2% in the medium term. How do you explain such a great emphasis on core inflation also given also considering that core inflation has not been a good leading indicator for headline inflation in the past. Thank you. Thank you very much. Data dependency is not forward guidance and I'll try to explain that for you for a second. I'm not giving you the forward guidance that come what may or subject to or until such time we will do this or that. That for me would be forward guidance and we had it in the past and it was very appropriate to have forward guidance as we were at the lower bound and that was a tool that was very useful. What I'm telling you now is given our baseline the findings that we have the data that we can analyse today our judgement in the room is that we are not pausing that applies to today and based on what we see we determine that we have more ground to cover. I'm not saying that in the abstract I'm saying that with reference to the baseline of March to what we are seeing in development and I'm here saying we believe that we have more ground to cover. It is not state dependent it is not time dependent it is a judgement that we make today. So I hope I've been clear to try to explain to you how we can actually say that very firmly without giving forward guidance and being data dependent. Comes the June meeting, comes the July meeting comes the September meeting and so on and so forth we will look at the data and we will use the three criteria of our reaction function for monetary policy purposes and we will make our decision on a meeting by meeting basis. So you've also asked me another question about core. We had long discussions about core and we actually had many more discussions on underlying inflation because core is interesting. Core is easy to communicate. You take headline, the whole basket of everything that's in the index you take out food, you take out anything having to do with energy and you have core. But we want to go a little bit deeper into the index and the evolution that we see and we have multiple measurements that you are familiar with the trim, the PCCI the PCCI excluding energy and so on and so forth. We look at all of those and we try to understand from the evolution that we see what is the likelihood of inflation evolution. So I'm not maybe addressing your core versus headline but simply I'm saying that headline is the objective that we have it's the target that we have that we've agreed in our strategy review it happens to be people see all prices increasing and we are working for the people of Europe. Core easy to communicate but maybe not as informative as we want it to be so that leads us to dissect in far more details inflation. Thank you. Thank you President Lagarde and the next question goes to Christian Sieden-Wiedel of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Christian please. Yes, thank you. I'm sure many people will be interested to know whether the worst of inflation is over for food. Do you have that impression? Thank you for that question because it is food prices that is hurting most particularly the most vulnerable people and we know that because in the basket of consumption the most vulnerable spend a lot more on food than those who are well off so we pay special attention of course to food and the increase in prices. We have seen it go down if you compare March and April numbers so it is going down but we have to be extremely attentive because there are multiple factors that apply to food prices that apply to processed food prices I think we have also flagged the fact that profit last year and particularly in 2022 have contributed to inflation. This year 23 what we have seen of 23 we see more wage increases contributing to inflation. We would hope that through a good social contract these drivers of inflation do not activate each other in what I have called in other places a tit for tat I want more wages I am not going to give up on profits and you are then at risk of something that is much more difficult and would lead us to have to take more active measures in monetary policy. I wish I could tell you of course it will continue to go down but I am observing that it has gone down there are other factors that will come into play clearly climate change that will have an impact probably on a sectoral basis probably in relation to certain food items what happens in Ukraine is also going to bring another uncertainty in the background of serial price in particular but commodity prices have gone down that is a fact hopefully it will channel to the ultimate consumer. Thank you Madame Lagarde and the next question goes to Andres Stumpf of Expansion. Andres please. Good afternoon Madame Lagarde Can the ECB continue hiking if the Fed stops is that a baseline scenario you are working on? And a second question do you have any estimates on how much tightening is the QT and the TLTRO maturity adding to the monetary policy stance? Can you perhaps phrase it in hiking or basis points of hikes? You know I've heard the fiscal dependency I've heard the finance dependency I had not heard the Fed dependency so the ECB is an independent central bank looks at what others do around the world from New Zealand which has been an interesting innovator in the field of monetary policy all the way to the Fed and others and it's obvious that the US economy in whichever way it evolves has spillover effect around the world given its size the depth of its financial markets but we have a target, we have a journey we know as of today that we have more ground to cover and whatever the decision of the Fed is in the next few weeks, months, we are going to be riveted to our objective and we'll of course take into account variables the currency for instance as an impact any spillovers will be taken into account but we are not Fed dependent in that respect as to the actual tightening impact that the APP runoff has I don't want to commit a number but it does not have a massive impact as far as to say but we can give you separately the exact amount that has been calculated but it's not material thank you and the next question goes to Anna Carismo of the Finnish television Yle hello and thank you for the opportunity and nice to see you again we met in Lapland so yeah you have repeated that the journey continues and you are not pausing there are many households in Finland, Lithuania, Spain that struggle with the much higher interest rates and have had to cut a lot of funding so how do you take them into account when hiking the interest rates and then a second one what should they prepare themselves for what can you say to them about the future when can we see the policy rates going down and maybe affecting also the 12 month Eurobore, thank you thank you so much and it's nice to see you again so of course we are aware of these households that have contracted loans with floating rates, variable rates whatever you call it and from Finland to Portugal from some of the Baltic countries to Spain it is the case that some families are hurting because the reimbursements that they have to honour have gone up as a result of the interest rate increases that we had to decide this is unfortunately not something that we can alleviate or attenuate because our task is price stability our task is to reduce inflation and the tools of choice that works in that respect is the interest rates and we have to use that interest rates some countries are taking particular steps and measures and financial institutions are also looking at offering moratorium or delay and I think that the best we can do is to really tame inflation in a timely manner meaning as fast as we can in order to then facilitate a return to different interest rates that would not be as high in the future and I'm not here making any commitment to cut at any point in time thank you very much thank you President Lagarde and the next question you will travel next week to Japan for G7 meeting what kind of topics do you want to bring at this upcoming meeting from European point of view thank you thank you for giving us that angle from the east I would hope that together with my European colleagues we can one learn from colleagues particularly Japan which is just now which is moving into a new direction with a new governor so anything that will be the Japanese monetary policy going forward and any understanding that we have of their strategy review which he has announced I will be of interest and I would be very happy to share with him the learnings from our strategy review which I had started when I took the job I would also hope that we can explain two colleagues from Canada, Japan and the United States that the Europeans together are going to continue to demonstrate resilience capacity to operate together and I would hope that in that respect something that we say in the statement here will resonate which is to agree on the fiscal governance in short order so that in addition to having a monetary policy that is common to 20 countries we also have a fiscal framework which gives governance to the 27 member states and that fiscal policies that are determined by member states are also focused on value for money for lack of a better word in other words putting in place the right reforms focusing the spending where it is going to increase the competitiveness and the efficiency of the economy which is something that is absolutely indispensable in order to have this social contract which is often associated with Europe thank you thank you Madame Lagarde and the next question goes to Isabella Bufakioff Isabella please good afternoon and thank you for the opportunity if I may go back to quantitative tightening just to understand whether there is more ground to cover on QT or whether with this end of investments on APP this is the end of QT there could be more to be done with PEP for example starting on pandemic or selling bonds to make it even quicker so this also helps to understand how important is QT as a restrictive tool monetary policy and my second question if I may is on Teltros because even if the European banking system is solid and resilient and the banking crisis from the US could be over we hope still Teltros are going to end in an odd moment and are you concerned are you confident the banks can give back 500 billion in June and get away with it 477 yeah thank you thank you very much on QT let me be very clear QT is the decision that we expect to implement as of the 1st of July concerns APP reinvestment only and nothing else we have forward guidance PEP reimbursement nothing until 24 and you will find I think in the annex to my statement reference to the PEP and to the principle of flexibility which we believe is an important key aspect of PEP going forward so those tools are intact we're not planning on not reinvesting anything that comes for redemption under the PEP agreement on the on Teltros there is no surprise about Teltros if anything we have managed to offer the possibility for banks to accelerate and anticipate the reimbursement which I think has avoided a cliff effect that we would have had in over a trillion dollars would have become outstanding in June thanks to the accelerated reimbursement we are now done to 477 I'm checking the numbers because I want to I want to be clear on that so it's not a surprise it's a come due date and reimbursements are due and I know that banks have prepared for it and that there is a lot of liquidity out there to continue to prepare having said that I wouldn't surprise me if some of the facilities that we have that are standing facilities liquidity windows that are available full allotment and rates that are well known to all would become they are usable but would be used again because that's perfectly normal job of a central bank to actually provide liquidity we have weekly, we have the LTR row three months of reimbursement on all those liquidity facilities and if anything was to happen we have demonstrated in the past that we can be inventive thank you thank you very much this concludes our press conference today so I wish you all the best we have the next press conference on 15th of June and until then all the best and a good afternoon thank you


Today we are checking out the largest Yu-Gi-Oh! collection on YouTube. What's up guys? Today I was live on Twitch and we checked out Moist Critical's every Yu-Gi-Oh! card collection.  And we did it live on Twitch, so if you guys want to be there at some point when I'm live streaming, I've been doing it a lot more, then go check out the link in the description. Let's see what you guys think about this crazy collection. Let's see what the collections look like. Moist Critical, he's admitting that he's collected every single Yu-Gi-Oh! card. I've not seen this whole video yet. I watched like a minute. Let's get into it. Yu-Gi-Oh! cards and Pokemon card extension. Basically just shine card board. It just triggered so much dopamine in my caveman brain. I just loved it. To me it just didn't make sense to get addicted to drugs when trading cards exist. Obsessive Collecting is a single player game that I've completed. So did he collect every single card? Like Ultimates or is like what? I completed my Yu-Gi-Oh! collection as well as the Pokemon collection that I set out to achieve. So I now have every single Yu-Gi-Oh! card. How does he show all these? Ultra Rare and above. So every card that exists as an Ultra Rare, Secret Rare, Ghost Rare, Ultimate Rare, Collectors Rare, Parallel Rare, all of it, Premium Gold, Gold Rare. I have every single one of them in first edition. How? I just want to show you this. I think I can say with a high level of confidence that I have the most impressive Yu-Gi-Oh! collection on YouTube. So let's start with that. Okay, all right, all right. Is he taking shots? What is this? On YouTube? Is that us? He's talking about us? Got a better collection than us, huh? Are we trying to say? I feel offended right now. The holy grail of Yu-Gi-Oh! collecting legend of Blue Eyes first edition. So of course you got the Dark Magician and the Blue Eyes, the Blue Eyes being the most coveted. I like this setup. This is very nice. It's like a hundred grand or something absurd. Guy, I got the Shaft. He has every other LOB Ultra in there, but Guy is not in there. And then the two Secret Rares at the bottom.  There it is, never mind. I'm letting you know right now, nothing in my collection is PSA 10 or even close. Because for me, I'm never going to grade these cards. I think grading is a giant scam. You pay more to get your cards graded than you ever would selling them. And it's super arbitrary. Not true. You just have to send in the right things. Very a lot of the numbers they put on the cards. I just find it to be- That may be true. So I don't care about grading. So just keep that in mind. These cards are not PSA 10s and they never will be. Now let me show you my favorite- Oh, look at this. This is so cool. Okay. This is cool. I like this more than the L.O.B. Ultra. You guys know I love ghosts, but this, yeah, I like this. I like this more. This is the ghost rare frame. Every single ghost rare ever printed exists in this beautiful sarcophagus. That includes the Rainbow Dragon misprint from Tactical Evolution. Yeah. Often considered the rarest misprint in all of Yu-Gi-Oh. Is it? I mean, it's rare, but I don't know. I was able to snatch this bad boy up about a year ago off an eBay server, but I'm pretty sure just took it from their child's toy box. So that was lucky and that kid's Christmas is ruined for sure, but I'm pretty happy about it. It does not come in first dead, which is why that is an unlimited. This is what the card is supposed to look like. The misprint is obviously, it says Rainbow Dragon.  We got to find it. I can't find the other one, but we've got one. We do have regular Rainbow Dragon. We don't have the other one though, the rarest misprint as he said, but we have this bad boy. This card is very hard to show. These BGS slabs guys, that's what I've been telling you. BGS slabs are garbage. How do you even see this thing? You can't even tell it's a ghost rare.  It has the art for the Elemental Hero Chaos Nios on it, whereas this one just has the actual Rainbow Dragon. The card actually got misprinted twice. You'll see Rainbow Dragon with Chaos Nios on it again. This was the very next set. This one did come in first edition though. They really struggled with that. The astute observer will notice a lot of dog hair in the frame because I have a husky named Tetra and her.  He's got all these ghost rare cards. Like, oh, look at this beautiful thousands of dollars worth of cardboard. By the way, there's some dog hair in here. Just ignore that part. Hair gets everywhere. Just like the entire air is littered with her hair particles. So when I was putting the cards in here, he's breathing it in. So it just got trapped in there. So I'm eventually going to have to take the frame off and just get the hair out. But I didn't feel like doing that before recording this video. It still looks fine even with all the dog hair in there. It even adds personality to it, I'd argue. Wow. Guys, have you guys seen how much apollosa is going for right now in a starlight rare? This sucker is like $1,200. By the way, in my effect failure, I bought two of these for my blue eyes deck that I've never actually played. They're $425 and $400 each or something like that. They're $720. Insane. Entire starlight set. Every starlight ever printed. A lot of these I actually pulled on stream when I was doing a lot of Yu-Gi-Oh openings on stream. Some of these have some sentimental value to me. Like I pulled a lot of these here. Like that rose, I pulled a couple. The $10,000 dragon. Like these really do have some meaning to me. Like I think of them as like my kids. So yeah, it looks wonderful. Love the starlights. This is going to be a nightmare to edit because I'm going to have to edit out all the parts where he's like the effin frame and all this stuff. Next let's move on to the collector's rares. Again, a lot of these I pulled on stream. Look at the hair. It's on the startups. Come on. All right, Charlie, we got to talk. I love your collection. It's awesome. I think you're hilarious, but this is unacceptable. This is unacceptable. You see this? This hair on of the collector's startups. It cannot happen. This cannot happen. You've got to fix this. This is all 60 collectors rares. This is their newest rares. There's only 60 of those. I guess there's only been four sets. Wow. That's cool. I guess now's the time to do a collection like this because you only have only 60 cards, but it's only going to get to be more. Like imagine if you had started collecting every secret like when they first started coming out and stuff like that. This is all 60 of those just hanging out, group hugging in the shower as well. Ultimate rares, nice. So this is just some of them, the classic. How many of you guys think there are? I think they all have one of those. I've got my own little Yu-Gi-Oh museum in here. Bro, where is he hanging these up? This is like a lot. This is like a full, like probably takes up an entire room. Here that I've cooked up. Oh, yeah. Look at that, Goyo Stardust. Stardust Dragon Ultimate Rare. I love this. Yeah, there's all here every Ultimate Rare. It's like 500 Ultimate Rares or something crazy. There's a ton of Ultimate Rares. Obviously, I have them in frames because I plan on hanging them, but I haven't done that for all of them. Oh, look at the flame eternity.  Look at this. We got Sager Phoenix, Galing Dragon, King Dragoon, Gear Freed, Lighting Vortex. This set is epic. I love this set. I haven't done that for all of them yet, but I did start. So you had an ancient set where we're down there. Bro, this is so cool. Have some clappers of nightmares. This one, I pulled myself this Injection Fairy Loom. Yeah, look at them. That's a pretty nice card. Really proud of that pull. Got that on stream. Also pulled one of my favorites here, the Raviel, part of the Sacred Beasts. These are the Ultimate Rares. Wait, he pulled that? Win! Dude, that is sick. Raviel, part of the Sacred Beasts. Time out. This has 1.669 million views. Why can't my videos get that many views? These are the Ultimate Rares from Shadows of Infinity. Just more classics all over the place. Bro, Metal Raiders. This is the best install job for a favorite card here. It's the Strike Ninja. I actually pulled this as a kid. Thought the card was so cool because I was a huge fan of Ninjas. My first, one of my first Xbox Live gamer tags was Ninja Maniac. Here's just some more. Oh, Elemental Energy. This is a big one. Ultimate Rares, these are going to be mainly your Elemental Rares. Really halfway through this video, guys. Halfway, and this is what we've seen. This is crazy. Hero sets, so from the GX era. These I actually think definitely look the best. This was their best Ultimate Rare sets. I, of course, all first-ed because I'm not a... D, D, Crow. I think I paused it just in time to where I could say that. And, yeah, I made sure not to miss any here. These were really hard to find. A lot of these Elemental Hero Ultimate Rares just... Shining Phoenix Enforcer. Screw that card. Don't really exist anymore. Like, there's not a ton for sale. So it took me, like, a long time to get some of these over a year. And then some of them I pulled from Power of the Dualist, like that Flare Nios. I was able to get two of those. Look, he's got Gold Series in his trash. This man just opening Gold Series for no reason. Ever since I was a kid, I also really liked the Egyptian God card. So I got every single Egyptian God card rarity ever printed, including the newest one from King's Court, the Secret Pharaoh's Rares. These are definitely the best they ever printed. These are the Secret Rares in the game. Even got the Japanese Exclusive... Those are the best. And then behind there is actually a really cool frame. But first, let me show you this. Just some more cool Ultimate Rares. And then this is more of like your... Ooh, just regular... Access Code! Can you do that for my neck? More modern cards. Oh, Gold Series next week. Still played today. So the Triple Tactics Talents, the Pot of Prosperity's Access Code, all that. I wanted a frame of just like cards that were really powerful for their time or still played today. Cards that were really powerful for their time are still played today. Okay, yeah, Maxi really good. Fossil Dino. We got Elemental Hero Guy. I don't know about that one. Oh, look, Ghost Bell. A lot of... Infinity Impermanence. Yeah, Ash Blossom for sure. Who was playing Dark Paladin? Maybe a Dual Links Farming Deck in 2017? That's all I can think of. So now that you've seen that, let me show you a really cool one. Ooh, turn him back! Bro! Let's go! Turn him back, Champion Pack. So you've got the strongest card in Yu-Gi-Oh for today, the Mechanical Chaser. Dude, the hair. The hair. And the very first one. That's another one! DD Warriors taking the brunt of it. Pack the Morphing Jar. I got all eight Tournament Packs and all eight Champion Pack cards, as well as the Premium Packs 1 and 2, some of my favorites from those. I have every card from Premium Packs, but I only frame... Okay, not gonna lie. I think Premium Pack is super boring. I know they have the Secret Rearist, which are kind of cool. I kind of like the Secret Rearist. I still love the set. I think it's kind of boring. This is a really cool frame. This is all of Gladiator Assault and First Dead. These cards are impossible. Gladiators Assault. We have never had good luck there. We'll find nowadays. At least the ones that aren't covered in spit and crumpled up like they were... Oh! Another air! ...used for toilet paper. I had to wait over a year... Wait, wait, where's the formula? ...to hit the market somewhere. I thought he said... Did he say all? Let's go back. Let's figure this out. This is a really cool frame. This is all of Gladiator Assault and First Dead. Did he forget about formula? He forgot about formula. So I got really lucky finding some of these. So this frame I'm really proud of. I've got all the Ultimate Rares and the Secret Rares. I don't think he got formula. The Secret Rares were the hardest to find. So you're... Maybe he has it somewhere else. Maybe he like put it somewhere else. Like the Necroface and SoulTaker. And I could only find the Magic Formula... There it is! Yeah! 9.5! He's like, I couldn't find anywhere else. He's bought a 9.5. That was probably like 5 grand at least. 9.5 graded First Dead Magic Formula. Like I said, I hate grading cards. I would never do it, but this was the only copy of this card I could find anywhere over the last year in some change. So yeah, I got to complete the... It is rare. It's very rare. The Gladiator Assault First Dead Collection. Speaking of graded cards though, this is the highest graded copy of this card ever in the world right now. Ooh, that's a sweet card. It's a Beckett 9 1998 Mirror Force. So before Konami had rights to Yu-Gi-Oh! It was owned by Bandai, and they printed an entire set, which is these right here. These are the highest prize cards. And promo cards as well. So I have all of those and they're really nice. Oh, is that Gay Guardian? I've never seen that one.  You guys see this? That's a little questionable. It's not like I wanted them graded or anything. I actually found these a couple years ago before I even got really big into collecting Yu-Gi-Oh! cards. I just happened to stumble upon them on eBay and I was like, that sounds like a good price for that. It was like a couple hundred bucks for that Mirror Force.  But here's the rest of the set. I'm not going to go through each card, but it was like 140 that they printed. Wow. And I have all of those. That's sick. But the biggest one here is the Mirror Force, Gay Guardian and Swords of Revealing Light. This frame is mainly just Dark Magician. Oh, DDS, speaking of DDS. Here they are. Questions and blue eyes that I thought were really rare. So these are World Championship replicas there. DDS Salet, ah! It's reminding me of how I didn't remember what game this was in. Dark Revelations 4. These are just three really rare cards there. And then these blue eyes and Dark Magicians here from Dark Duel Store.  This is kind of what mine looks like. It's a Game Boy game. These are extremely hard to find. So I got lucky that I was able to pick those up. You could open a game. This is one of the great ones. Dark Magician blue eyes from the Stargarder X first add. And then some of the ultimate rares for Kaiba there with like the Crush card virus and blue eyes. Like I briefly mentioned though, it's not all Yu-Gi-Oh. So I have all of the masterpiece. Imagine finding this collection in your grandpa's basement. Yeah, that would be a good one. Magic the Gathering cards as well because Masterpiece I thought was just incredible. Okay, Magic the Gathering. Oh, wow. He had to go and ruin it. No, I'm just kidding. Then I have some Gold Star Charizard. Just chillin'. There you can see the damaged Gold Star Mewtwo, Rekwaza. I haven't finished the Gold Star Collection. I will at some point, but here's my... What? These are uns... I mean, they're sleeved, but they're just like in stacks. Gold Star Charizard, First Edition Charizard. Here you go. Their first add base set. Pokemon. Pokemon. The party doesn't stop. That first add Charizard. You see where his true loyalty is like. Everything else is in there. 300 grand. I was able to get that bad boy for like two grand because it was listed as damaged. And I think it looks just fine. Like I said, as long as it looks good in a frame, that's all I can... Ooh. Sukiomi. I need another one of those. Charlie. Hit me up. Really happy with being able to get that. So I finished the entire base set first add collection. These are... Kais! That's what we were just talking about. I don't have that dueling. These are just more ultimate rares that I haven't framed yet. This is all of the ultimate rares from the OTS packs. And they all look great. Just haven't had a chance to finish framing all of them.  Everything that's not in frames is in these binders. So everything from the movie packs, from the video games, all of it's in here, as long as it's ultra rare and above. So mainly ultra rares and secret rares. That's crazy man. Every single one of them. Was he just like on TCGplayer just buying all this stuff for like three months? Every single card ever printed in Yu-Gi-Oh. That is ultra rare. Like literally. I think that's what he did. Except championship. I have that ultimate rare too. I just bought it for my dart magician deck. Because I obviously haven't won any championships. So I didn't get the prize cards. So that I may never be able to complete my collection with. But I'm super satisfied with it. This was quite a long time of work in order to finally. Yeah, I wonder how long it took him to show it to all of you. Because I'm super proud of it. It's a collection that I've always wanted to complete at some point ever since I was a kid. That's about it. See ya.


The Cube presents UiPath Forward 5, brought to you by UiPath. Hi everybody, we're back at UiPath Forward 5. This is Dave Vellante with Dave Nicholson. Derek Muir series, automation product line lead for Merck. Thank you by the way for all you guys do. Thank you Dave for having us. In the vaccine area, saving our butts. And Bill Engel is back on the Cube. He's the director at CGI guys. Good to see you again. Good to see you. Thank you.  Take us through Derek, what's happening in sort of your world that's informing your automation strategy? Well, Dave, I mean, as you know, we just came out of the pandemic. We actually have quite a few products like a Gavrio antiviral pill. Obviously we worked, you know, continue to drive our products through a difficult time. But you know, it was during these last few years that we've accelerated our journey in automation. We're about four years plus in our journey. You know, so just like the theme of this conference, we're trying to move towards, you know, bigger automations, transformational change, continue to drive digital transformation in our company. Now Bill, you've been on before, but CGI, tell people about the firm. It's not computer graphics imaging. Sure, no, it's definitely not. So CGI, we're a global consultancy, about 90,000 folks across the world. We're both a product company and a services company, so we have a lot of different, you know, software products that we deliver to our clients, such as CGI Advantage, which is a state local government ERP platform. And so outside of that, my team does automation, and so we wrap automation around our IP and deliver it to our clients.  You're in, so take us through, what was the catalyst? How did you get started? Obviously it was pre-pandemic, so it's interesting, a lot of companies pre-pandemic gave lip service to digital transformation. Sounds like you guys already started your journey, but I'll come back to that. But take us back to the catalyst four years ago. Why automation? We'll get into why UI path. Right, so I would say it started pretty niche in our company, started first in our finance area. Of course, you know, we were looking at technology, evaluating different companies, Luprism, UI path, ultimately we chose UI path, did it on-prem, just start to use automation in sort of our invoice processing, sort of our financial processes, right? And then from there, after, it was really when the pandemic hit, that's when sort of we all went to remote work, that's when the team, the COE, continued to scale up, especially during pandemic, we were trying to automate more and more processes, given the fact that more and more of our workers are remote, they'll be processes, how do you do events? Part of our livelihood is meeting with, engaging with customers, customers in this cases are doctors and physicians, right? How do you engage with them digitally? How do you, a lot of the face-to-face contact now have to kind of shift to more digital way? And so automation was a way to kind of help accelerate that, help facilitate that. I think you mentioned COE as in center of excellence. So describe your approach to implementing automation.  What does that interaction look like? We do have both, I would say in the beginning that it was more decentralized, but over time, we over the few years, as we built more and more bots, we're now at maybe somewhere between 400 to 500 bots, we now have sort of internal to the company, functional verticals, right? So there's an animal health, we have an animal health function, so there's a team building, engaging with the animal health business to build animal health bots. There's human health, which is what I work on, as well as HR, finance, manufacturing, research. And so internally, there's engagement leads, one of the engagement leads that interact with the business, then when there's an engineering squads that help build and design, develop and support and maintain those, as well as sort of a DevOps team that supports the platform and maintains all the bot infrastructure. So you started in finance, it's a common story, I'm sure you hear this a lot Bill. How did you decide what to target? Was it process-driven decision? Was it data-oriented, some kind of combination? How did you decide? Do you remember or can you take us back there? Yeah, so for CGI, how we started to engage with Merck is we do a lot of other business with Merck. We work in other different business lines and we understand the business process. So we knew where there was potential for automation. So we brought those ideas to Merck and really kind of landed there and helped them realize the value from automation from that standpoint. And then from there, the journey just continued to expand. Looking for those use cases that fit the mold for RPA to start and now the evolution is to go to broader hyper-automation. And was it CFO led into the finance department and then sort of more bottoms up? So I think it started in finance but we actually really started out in the business line. So out in regulatory, clinical, that's where we have the life science expertise that are embedded and so I partnered with them to come up with, hey, here's a real solution we could do to help streamline, say, submission archiving. So when submissions come back from the FDA they need to be archived into their system of record. So those are the types of use cases that we helped automate. Okay, you're saying a human had to sort of physically archive that and you were able to sort of replicate that. Okay, and you started with software robots, obviously RPA and now you're expanding into, we're hearing from UiPath this platform message. How does that coincide, Derek, with what you guys are doing? Are you sort of adding platform? What aspects of the platform are you adding? Yeah, no, I mean, we are on-premise, right? So we have the platform but some of the cool things we just had another colleague of mine presented earlier today. Some of the cool things were doing ephemeral infrastructure. So infrastructure as code, which essentially means instead of having all these dedicated bot machines, because these bots only, in some cases, run 10 minutes and they're done. So we're sort of doing on demand, start up a server, run the bot, when it's finished, kill the server. So we only pay for the servers that we use, which allows us to save a whole lot of money. Serverless bots. So you're doing that on-prem? So that's cloud? We're doing it on-prem, but our bot machines actually run the, let's say SAP process, right? We spin that machine up, it's on the cloud, it runs, it finishes, let's say it's processed in one hour and then when it's done, we kill that machine. So we only play for that one hour usage of that bot machine. Okay, so you mentioned SAP, you remember earlier you mentioned Blue Prism, when you probably looked at other competitors too, you pulled the Gartner Magic Quadrant, blah, blah, blah, with the way people evaluate technology. But SAP's got a product. Why UiPath? I mean, is it that a company like SAP too narrow for their only SAP, you wanted to apply it other ways? Maybe they weren't even in the business that back then, four years ago, they probably weren't, but I'm curious as to how the decision was made for UiPath. Well, I think you hit it right on the nail. SAP sort of came on a little later and they're specific to sort of their function, right? So UiPath for us is the most flexible tool, can interact by UI to our sales and marketing systems, to Workday, to ServiceNow, it cuts across every function that we have in the company, as well as you're the most mature, I mean, you're the market leader, right? So, definitely you continue to build upon those capabilities, and we are exploring the new capabilities, especially being announced today. And what do you see, Bill, in the marketplace? Are you kind of automation tool agnostic? Are you more sort of, all in on- I would say we are agnostic as a company, but obviously as part of an automation practice lead, I want to deliver solutions to my clients that are going to benefit them as a whole. So looking at UiPath, this platform is, it covers the end-end spectrum of automation, so I can go really into any use case and be able to provide a solution that delivers value. And so that's where I see the value in UiPath, and that's why CGI is a customer as well. We automate our internal processes. We actually have, we just launched, you probably saw it in the market last week, an expanded partnership with UiPath. We launched CGI Excel 360. That's our fully managed service around automation. We host our clients' whole UiPath infrastructure and bots. It's completely hands off to them, and they just get the value out of automation. Nice, love it. Derek, you mentioned this ephemeral infrastructure. Sounds like it's also ethereal, possibly. You're saying you have processes that are running on premises, but then you reach out to have an automation process that's running, that's happening off-prem, and you're sort of on the cloud. So we have an in-house orchestrator, so we're not using your sort of on-the-cloud orchestrator. So we brought it in-house for security reasons. But we use, so inside the VPN, we have these cloud machines that run these automations. So that's the ephemeral side of the infrastructure. But is there a financial angle to that in terms of when you're spinning these things up, is it a pay-by-the-drink or a buy-by-the-CPU hour? Yeah, so if you can imagine, like I mentioned, we're somewhere between four to 500 bots, and every bot has a time slot to run and take a certain amount of time. And so that's hundreds and hundreds of bot machines that we, in the old days, have to buy and procure and staff and support and maintain. So in this new model, and we're just beginning to kind of move from pilot into implementation, we're moving all the bots to this ephemeral infrastructure. So these machines, these bot machines are spun up, they run their automation, and then they spin down. But just to be clear, they're being spun up on physical infrastructure that is within your purview. They're spun up on AWS, and then they spin down. Okay, got it, got it, interesting. Four to 500 bots, Daniel, one point, you play out this vision of a bot. Chicken in every pod, I call it a bot for every employee. Is that where you're headed, or is that kind of in this new ephemeral world? Not necessary, it's like maybe every employee has access to an ephemeral bot. How are you thinking about that? That's a good question. So obviously the four to 500 is a mix of unattended bots versus attended bots that we also have a citizen developer sort of a group team. We support that as well from the COE. So we see the future as a mix. There's a spectrum of we are the professional development team. There's also we support and nurture the personal automation, and we provide the resources to help them build smaller scale automations that help reduce the mundaneness and the hours of their own tasks. But for us, we want to focus more and more on building bigger and bigger transformation automations that really drive process efficiencies and savings. And what's the business impact been? You mentioned savings or maybe there's other sort of productivity, how do you measure the benefit, the ROI, and do you want to find that? I don't think we have all the right answers, but simple metrics like number of hours saved or other sort of excitement, sort of like an NPS internal NPS between the different groups that we engage. Well, we definitely see automation demand coming from our functional teams going up, driving up. So it's continued to be a hot area. And hopefully we can, like what the key message and theme of this conference, essentially we want to take and build upon the good work that we've done in terms of RPA. We want to drive it more towards digital transformation. So Bill, what are you seeing across your customer base in terms of ROI? I'm not looking for percentages. I'm sure they're off the charts. But in terms of, you can optimize for fast payback, maybe lower the denominator, or you can optimize for net benefit over time. What are customers after? They want fast payback and little quick hits, or are they looking for sort of a bigger enterprise-wide impact? Yeah, I think it's the latter. It's that larger impact, right? Obviously they want an ROI, and just depending upon the use case, that's going to vary in terms of the benefits delivered. And a lot of our clients, depending on the industry, so in life sciences, it may be around compliance, like GXB compliance is huge. And so that may not be much of a time saver, but it ensures that they're running their processes and they're being compliant with federal standards. So that's one aspect to it. But to a bank, they're looking to reduce their overall costs and so on. But yeah, I think the other part of it is impacting broader business processes. So taking that top-down approach versus bottom-up, doing the ones you choose, the tasks, is not as impactful as looking at broader across an entire business process and seeing how we can impact it. Now, Derek, when you guys support a citizen developer, how does that work? So, hey, I got this task I want to automate, I'm going to write a software robot, I'm going to go do an automation. Do I just do it and then throw it into the fence? So you guys send me a video on how to do it, hold my hand, how's that work? Yeah, I mean, good question. So we obviously direct them to the UIPath Academy, get some training. We also have some internal training materials to how to build a bot sort of internal inside Merck. We go through, we have write-ups and SOPs on using the right framework for automations, using the right documentation, PDD kind of materials. And then ultimately, how do we deploy a bot inside the Merck ecosystem? But maybe I'll just add, I think you asked the point about ROI before. I'll also say, because we're a pharmaceutical company, I think one of the other key metrics is actually time saved, right? So if we have a bot that helps us get through the clinical process or even the getting a label approved faster, even if it's eight days saved, that's eight days of a product that can get out to the market faster to our patients and healthcare professionals. And that's immeasurable benefit. Yeah, I bet. You can compress that elapsed time of getting approval and so forth. All right guys, we've got to go. Thanks so much. Congratulations on all the success and appreciate you sharing your story. Thank you so much. Appreciate it. All right, thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for Dave Nicholson, The Cube's coverage, two day coverage. We're here in day one, UI path forward five. We'll be right back right after this short break. Awesome. Great.