I will not speak about official policies, but about work in progress. Let me first spend some words about the Secretariat. It is a small group, 40 people all in all, bringing together trainees, staff with short-term

contracts. In reality, the core is 20, 25 people that are led by me and by Tuomas Pelton, who I would like really to thank because he has been the person who has been thinking, preparing and bringing forward the program for this conference.

Many of the colleagues of the Secretariat are here. I would like really to thank Eva, Shirley, Beatriz, who may be somewhere, who are those who have been preparing everything for today. Obviously, the Secretariat is multinational.

It is not a surprise being here at the ECB, but it is also and above all multidisciplinary and it is trying to animate the ESRB as its in-house think tank. I will tell you about four areas of work on which we have been focusing these days.

The first is on EIMIR. The second is on the central counterparties. The third is on commercial real estate vulnerabilities. The fourth is on investment fund risks. On all these issues, we have been always working with the entire membership.

It has been, the concept has been we are working on an equal basis with all the institutions of the ESRB. Let me start with EIMIR. EIMIR offers us big data.

We get, thanks to ESMA, 50 million data points per day. First of all, it is an issue of finding a meeting point between market information and IT technology. In fact, what we are doing is to create a supportive infrastructure which gives us the

possibility not only to capture but also to analyse in real time all this data. The question we have been asking ourselves is elementary, if you want. Is big data equal to big risks?

But you can also, of course, question the same point in positive terms. Is big data an opportunity to understand market dynamics using granular information which you never had?

One point I would like you to bring home today is that Europe is making use of this information. Not only for research, which is, of course, necessary, but also for analysis and for policy response.

What we are trying to do is to create an automatic monitoring which will permit us to have, at the beginning of every day, after the data have been browsed overnight, a number of informations about possible vulnerabilities which have been accumulating in the market.

To this aim, we are currently identifying risk indicators we have done with our institutions. But we are very willing to cooperate with anybody who would like to help us on this. And the ambition is to work on this data with our institutions but also with the researchers

and policy institutions worldwide. Let me turn to the second point, central counterparties. CCPs are the new bleak players in town, but do we know them?

There is a lot of data available thanks to the CPMI-IOSCO Disclosure Framework, which is as broad institution to publish statistical information in the respective websites. But this data are at times not consistent, and in any case, they have not been object so far

of public discussion on financial stability terms. What we are doing is to set up indicators. We are doing it once again collectively with our membership, which will be eventually included in our risk dashboard, we hope, as from next year.

And what we have already done, we have brought together the CCPs to ensure we understand their numbers well. Let me now turn to the third area of work. It's about commercial real estate. Now, we have recently heard from the largest operator in the market worldwide

that out of the 10 prime commercial real estate destinations, what price has been particularly buoyant this year, eight are in Europe, eight out of 10.

So, Europe is catching up rapidly in terms of prime commercial real estate. This is, of course, a sign that the crisis to a certain extent in its most acute manifestation is finished.

This is good, but it is also bad maybe, because, of course, this is also a sign of search for yield, because risks of volatility exist, in particular in a situation where, in some cases,

in really prime destination, more than half of investment comes from outside the European Union, which basically means that this money could fly if market conditions changed. Certainly, there is a common phenomenon across Europe, which is typically concentrated in capitals,

but also in many other important business locations. And what we are doing is we are trying to analyze numbers. There exist, we have been issuing a recommendation last year to close data gaps in terms of the so-called collateral stretch,

which basically means try to understand what happens to prices, in terms of the financial stretch. So, we are trying to understand whether not only banks, but also insurance and pension funds and other investments are strong enough to possibly withstand pressure in the market,

in terms of income and financials, because we want to see whether those who are in the market are able to earn sufficient money to repay the debt, and, of course, in terms of spillovers. The fourth and last area where we have been working is investment fund risk.

Now, this is a tremendously large and also controversial issue, where you will hear very different views according to whether you are speaking to policymakers or to market. Of course, I am representing here the policymaking community.

What we see is that this is a booming industry. You can see it from the shadow banking monitoring, which has been presented yesterday to you. And we have to ask ourselves two questions. The first one is are investment funds presenting and generating risks per se?

But even if it's not the case, the second question is are the risks which would be possibly amplified due to the investment fund industry? Think about the possible negative externalities of higher sales.

And the issues at stake here are the liquidity conditions, the possible excessive leverage and the quality of stress testing. This is all work which is now being performed, so do not expect policy announcements on this today or in the next weeks.

But work will continue in the next months to the technical and policy bodies of the European Systemic Risk Board and the institutions which belong to it. And now, I would like to give the floor to Andre Arria, chair of the European Banking Authority,

for the first session on the challenges and the future of banking in the European Union. Thank you very much and welcome.