Efforts are therefore being made to seek out creative and innovative ways to make better use of existing collateral in terms of making these assets available, when and where they are needed. Both the Eurosystem and the industry have taken a number of initiatives in this respect. At today’s conference, you will probably hear more about the many innovative solutions that are coming from the industry in this respect, so I will limit myself to some key initiatives in which the ECB/Eurosystem is directly involved, although naturally cooperating closely with the industry. The first initiative in this respect of course is TARGET2 Securities – T2S. The main objective of establishing this single European infrastructure for securities settlement is to reduce risk and increase efficiencies in the post-trade environment, especially as far as cross-border settlement is concerned. This greatly enhanced process for transferring collateral across national borders in Europe will in itself be a huge benefit to market participants – both to cover collateralised money market transactions as well as collateralised credit operations with central banks. Moreover, T2S incorporates several features that aim to help banks optimise their collateral management. Once T2S goes live for example, banks will no longer need to hold multiple buffers of collateral when settling in several European countries and can instead use the state-of-the-art T2S auto-collateralisation and self-collateralisation features, also on a cross-border basis. The second initiative that I want to mention is the implementation of cross-border triparty collateral management services within the Eurosystem collateral framework.
I thank you. 2  BIS Review 15/2009