This study has considered the impact that the Financial Services Action Plan and the legislative measures of the Financial Services White Paper have already had and should be expected to have in the future. These impacts are considered for the European Union as a whole and for each of the...

The Bank of Cyprus Public Company Ltd. was founded in 1899 and is the holding company of the Bank of Cyprus Group. The Bank is the leading financial services organisation in Cyprus and operates 115 branches in Greece. It is also well established in the United Kingdom, where it operates six...

This report gives an overview of working conditions, job quality, workers’ health and job sustainability in the financial services sector, covering the subsectors of banking (NACE 64), insurance (NACE 65), and activities auxiliary to banking and insurance (NACE 66). It is based mostly on the...

Four years after the introduction of the euro, this paper provides an overview of the current structure and integration of the euro area financial systems and related policy initiatives. We first compare the euro area financial structure with that of the United States and Japan. Using new and...

This paper studies the relative pricing of euro area sovereign CDS and the underlying government bonds. Our sample comprises weekly CDS and bond spreads of ten euro area countries for the period from January 2006 to June 2010. We first compare the determinants of CDS spreads and bond spreads and...

Exchanges and other trading platforms are often vertically integrated to carry out trading, clearing and settlement as one operation. We show that such vertical silos can prevent efficiency gains from horizontal consolidation of trading and settlement platforms to be realized. Independent of the...

The competition between a central securities depository (CSD) and a custodian bank is analysed in a Stackelberg model. The CSD sets its prices first, the custodian bank follows. There are many investor banks each of which has to decide whether to use the service of the CSD or of the custodian...

This paper compares securities settlement gross and netting architectures. It studies settlement risk arising from exogenous operational delays and compares settlement failures between the two architectures as functions of the length of the settlement interval under different market conditions....

This paper investigates the impact on the network growth of the level of merchant discount, the level of Multilateral Interchange Fee (MIF), and the consumers' and the merchants' awareness of positive network effects. In an artificial market, in which issuers and acquirers belong to the same...