While silos may help infrastructure providers to reduce operating costs and to better coordinate the prices of the different integrated services (e.g. trading, clearing and settlement), they may reduce competition when they are misused, for example, to favour a central counterparty in the silo over its competitors outside of the silo.
As the Eurosystem explained in its policy statement of September 2001, the disadvantages of vertical silos  2  BIS Review 29/2006  “can be overcome provided that customers can choose between systems along the value chain […].