Likewise, customer deposits at a bank grow when customers make a shift in their portfolio from medium term debt certificates issued by the bank to deposits, or if they take cash to the bank and have it credited to their account. When transactions are conducted in the opposite direction, or when borrowers pay off their loan, the banks’ customer deposits decrease accordingly. Page 5/12  Let us take a step back and look briefly at what actually goes on at an individual bank. 7 A bank’s balance sheet typically contains comparatively illiquid, long-term claims such as loans on the assets side and comparatively liquid, short-term liabilities such as sight deposits on the liabilities side. The bank therefore engages in liquidity and maturity transformation, mediating between the diverging requirements of savers and investors. Savers want secure and readily available deposits, while investors need long-term loans to finance projects, which tend to be illiquid. The bank thus bears both credit risk and liquidity risk. Due to the large number of depositors and borrowers, these risks can be diversified. Moreover, with their focus on lending activities, banks have the advantage over individual savers of being better able to assess and monitor borrowers. This opens up access to loans for parts of the economy that cannot raise funds on the capital market and would hardly be able to finance their projects without a bank. By providing loans, banks therefore perform an important economic task.
But we are not content with this and aim for a further improvement. The tasks as such, the proximity to economic policy and the international dimension should be sufficiently attractive. If, in addition, we can create an environment in which people can grow and feel they are an important part of the organisation, then I believe we can do still better. There are many connections between an open, clear relationship with the outside world on the one hand and our internal work on the other. Distinct goals have helped to focus internal operations and tighten the analysis. By making things less hush-hush we have also made it possible to include more people in a realistic discussion of monetary policy, for example. We are now open to criticism of a sharper and more specific nature and that has been good for us. The Riksbank's motto, Hinc robur et securitas (Hence strength and security), which used to allude to our earlier functions as the producer of notes and coins, for example, now refers at least as much to our analytical competence, the accuracy of our analyses and our efficiency as an authority. Management with an executive board One consequence of the new Riksbank Act, effective from the beginning of 1999, was that a new Executive Board, consisting of six members, is collectively responsible for all the Bank's operations.