*  *  *  Introduction Ladies and Gentlemen, I would like to welcome you to the workshop on “Recent advances in modelling systemic risk using network analysis” here at the ECB. A workshop on systemic risk that provides an analytical focus on the financial sector as a network of financial agents could not come at a more timely moment.
In 1896 the German sociologist Georg Simmel stated in his book “The Philosophy of Money”: “money is the spider that spins society’s web”. With this, Simmel already at the time pointed to the network aspect of money, how financial innovation can transform the economy and society; and the transformation process as changes in the complexity, size and nature of economic and societal networks.