TARGET2-Securities

The Eurosystem conducts the oversight of TARGET2-Securities (T2S). T2S is a Eurosystem infrastructure that provides the European post-trading industry with a single, borderless, pan-European platform for securities settlement in central bank money.

The systemic importance of T2S

• It provides core settlement services in central bank money to many euro area and non-euro area central securities depositories (CSDs) and central banks.
• It concentrates large settlement volumes, including Eurosystem credit operations, on one platform.
• The settlement finality of the securities transactions is achieved in T2S accounts.

Oversight of T2S

The Eurosystem has legal competence to oversee T2S. The ECB has primary oversight responsibility for T2S and leads and coordinates all oversight activities. The main objective of the oversight of T2S is to ensure the safety and efficiency of the critical services T2S provides on a continuous basis and to foster the compliance of T2S with the relevant oversight standards. Additionally, the oversight of T2S aims at ensuring that T2S facilitates compliance of participating CSDs and NCBs with the oversight standards and regulatory requirements to which each are expected to comply.

Furthermore, the Eurosystem has set up the T2S Cooperative Arrangement in line with “Responsibility E: Cooperation with other authorities” of the CPSS-IOSCO Principles for financial market infrastructures (PFMIs) to ensure that all authorities with a legitimate interest in the smooth functioning of T2S are adequately involved.

The T2S Cooperative Arrangement includes the ECB, overseers and supervisors of CSDs using T2S services, central banks of issue for currencies settled in T2S, and the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) in its role as coordinator of the competent authorities for the supervision of CSDs.

Applicable oversight standards

The oversight of T2S aims to ensure the safe and efficient operation of T2S as a critical infrastructure taking into account the technical platform, legal basis, governance structure, comprehensive risk management framework and services provided. The oversight assessments are conducted against an applicable subset of the principles and key considerations of the CPMI-IOSCO PFMIs as defined in the document Applicability of CPMI-IOSCO Principles for financial market infrastructures to TARGET2-Securities.