In response to this situation, from August 2007 onwards, the ECB started to conduct additional and special liquidity providing operations with the objective of ensuring that solvent banks did not loose the ability to refinance themselves despite the fact that the interbank market had become dysfunctional.
After the collapse of Lehman Brothers in October 2008 the ECB began to conduct these operations under the fixed-rate full-allotment procedure which allowed banks to determine through their own demand how much liquidity the Eurosystem provided to the interbank market.