In parallel to the efforts to move towards an integrated market infrastructure, the Eurosystem has taken steps to increase the efficiency of its market infrastructure. This has been facilitated by technological progress and innovation. At the same time, we have to take into account that digitalisation and the social diffusion of real-time information and communication has fundamentally changed end user expectations.
Access to and use of financial services anytime, anywhere, via multiple devices/access channels is taken for granted now. This not only has consequences for the service layer, but also for the underlying clearing and settlement layers. A further impact on certain functionalities within the market infrastructure may be expected from distributed ledger technologies (DLTs).