This was the first major relaxation of the exchange controls announced by Mr Manuel since he became Minister of Finance in April 1996 and confirmed his endorsement of the policy of the gradual removal of the exchange controls. Secondly, the Minister himself regarded the announced relaxations as an important change in the underlying philosophy held by the Government on exchange controls.
It was created by interconnecting the then-15 national real-time gross settlement (RAGS) systems and the EBB payment mechanism. TARGET was created to provide a safe, efficient and reliable mechanism for the settlement of cross-border large value payments in euro and to serve the needs of Euro system monetary policy.