The first two building blocks offer unlimited refinancing against a very wide range of collateral. However, they can only reach the financial system because of the very large number of counterparties that participate in our refinancing operations. Currently, 2,200 credit institutions in the euro area have the opportunity to refinance themselves with us.
This fact demonstrates the scale of our outreach to the financial system in the euro area and its effectiveness in insuring against a systemic liquidity threat. 3. The third building block concerns the lengthening of the maturities of our refinancing operations. In a first step, we lengthened the maturities to up to six months.