Making Economic and Monetary Union a success  Economic and monetary union as set out in the Maastricht Treaty transfers the competence for the conduct of a single monetary policy into the hands of a new supranational institution, the Eurosystem, with the ECB at its centre. At the same time, economic policies have essentially remained the competence of the Member States.
For these users, the difficulty arises where there is no mechanism to co-ordinate the two sides. The party paying is thus exposed to the risk that the counterparty fails to deliver, and vice versa. In other words, there is often no mechanism to ensure delivery-versus-payment. In securities markets this is by now a relatively familiar issue.