With the close of the business day on 6 February 2017, the German market with its central securities depository, Clearstream Banking AG, migrated successfully, as scheduled, to TARGET2-Securities (T2S), the Eurosystem’s single shared platform for securities settlement. The work involved in the changeover over the past weekend and the close of the first business day were completed smoothly. Besides Clearstream Banking AG and its Luxembourg subsidiary LuxCSD, the central securities depositories of Slovakia, Slovenia, Hungary and Austria transferred their securities settlement to T2S as part of this fourth wave. Since T2S was launched on 22 June 2015, a total of 18 central securities depositories and their markets have now migrated to this platform. This means that T2S is a major step closer to the vision of it becoming a hub for European securities settlement.

Owing to the size of the German market with around 40% of the expected T2S transaction volume, the fourth migration wave is especially significant, with the transaction volume in T2S nearly doubling in size. With Clearstream, cross-border securities settlements are also being carried out on a major scale for the first time via T2S.

In addition to standardisation and harmonisation making settlement easier, German market participants can now benefit from the opportunities to optimise their liquidity and collateral management.

The early and comprehensive involvement of German market participants in the preparations was possible thanks to the Bundesbank’s productive collaboration with Clearstream Banking AG. As a result of the close cooperation between everyone involved in the project, the German market’s migration proved a great success.