In this regard, the Eurosystem’s initial objective is to have a Single Euro Payments Area – a SEPA – for citizens and enterprises in the euro area from 1 January 2008 onwards. According to the Commission’s regulation, the price charged by banks for a cross-border transfer must be the same as that of a transfer within the same country. While prices to the end-customer have been homogenised through legislation, the level of service cannot be influenced by legislation. What is lacking is the possibility of using national instruments for pan-European business as well. A real SEPA will only be achieved when payments can be made throughout the whole area from a single bank account, using a single set of payment instruments, as easily and safely as in the national context today. The ECB’s second objective is to have a SEPA for the infrastructure by the end of 2010. Once national instruments, services and standards have been gradually phased out and replaced by pan-European ones, national infrastructures will be abolished or transformed into pan-European ones. Consequently, decisions related to the next generation of national systems should be made from a pan-European perspective to ensure compliance with the SEPA. To encourage national implementation, the respective national banking communities should translate the SEPA objectives into national transformation plans, allowing each bank and infrastructure provider to tailor its strategies and solutions towards a SEPA. The ECB intends to monitor this progress with the assistance of the European Payments Council (EPC).
Although the way in which they steer their individual money markets differs, ultimately they provide just the amount of liquidity that is necessary to maintain the key monetary policy rate at the targeted level. The SNB reacted rapidly, and was the very first central bank to provide additional liquidity, which it did on 9 August, by means of fine-tuning measures. In the course of the following days, we continued to provide the banking system with generous supplies of funds as part of our regular auction procedure. In this way, we succeeded in rapidly defusing tensions on the call money market. Since then, we have carrying out fine-tuning measures on a consistent basis, in order to dampen sharp fluctuations in the call money rate in either direction. This has allowed us to stabilise the very short-term Swiss franc money market. However, we were unable to prevent risk premiums in interbank business from rising, since this is largely independent of our measures. As can be seen in graph 2, the three-month Swiss franc Libor had risen to 2.90% by mid-September 2007, which was substantially above the level targeted by us. By international standards, however, the increase in Libor was minimal. Our monetary policy decision of 13 September was aimed at further calming the Swiss franc money market, by bringing the three-month Libor back down to around 2.75%. With this in mind, we made funds available to banks for a term of three months. We did this from the day of the monetary policy assessment onwards.