10 While the ECB was always of the opinion that financial benchmarks should be private initiatives to best suit private needs, we have also helped the private sector in some of the benchmark reforms given the tremendous consequences of certain benchmarks for proper market functioning. In particular, we are closely accompanying the transition of the Euribor from a quote-based to a transaction-based index.
We have been involved in the discussions for some time as, together with the Euribor administrator, we launched data collections in 2012 and 2013 to analyse the feasibility of a transaction-based reference rate. Now the transition to the transaction-based methodology, with a pre-live phase starting this summer, is foreseen by the Euribor administrator for early 2017.