The Governing Council of the ECB reacted swiftly and decisively by switching its refinancing operations to tenders with full allotment. As long as banks were able to pledge adequate collateral, they received unlimited amounts of liquidity from the Eurosystem. In practice, this allowed them to bypass the strained interbank market.
With the advent of the euro as a common currency, integration was at the heart of the Eurosystem’s strategy for building its RTGS system and the Correspondent Central Banking Model (CCBM) in the 1990s. The elimination of differences between national and cross-border retail payments in euro was a key ambition behind the creation of the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA).