Eurosystem is the central banking system of the Euro area consisting of the European Central Bank and the national central banks of the European Union member states that have adopted the Euro as their common currency.
TARGET2 is expected to replace the decentralized technical platforms operating under the name TARGET (Trans-European Automated Real-time Gross settlement Express Transfer system). The existing system, TARGET1 settles approximately 350,000 payments in a day with a value of 2.4 trillion Euro with reliability of 99.87%.
TARGET2 will be run by the Eurosystem under the responsibility of the Governing Council of the European Central Bank (ECB). A consortium of three Eurosystem central banks, including the Banca d’Italia, the Banque de France, and the Deutsche Bundesbank jointly provide the technical infrastructure required for the development of Single Shared Platform (SSP) of TARGET2. Further, this consortium will be responsible for operating the platform on behalf of the Eurosystem.
The first migration group, which consists of the national central banks and the respective TARGET user communities in Austria, Cyprus, Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxemburg, Malta and Slovenia, have now migrated to the shared platform. Other countries are expected to migrate by May 2008.
Source: ComputerWire daily updates
