GFF Podcast

GC Pooling 20th Anniversary Special

• Clearstream

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We are celebrating the 20th anniversary of GC Pooling®, Deutsche Börse Group’s segment tailored to meet the needs of short-term collateralized money market trading and financing, as well as efficient collateral management. This episode brings together some of the people who made it happen, as well as the leaders driving today’s innovations that ensure GC Pooling remains a high-tech channel at the heart of European money markets. 

Join Gerd Hartung, Marcel Naas, Dirk Rothenbach, Marton Szigeti, Carsten Hiller, Frank Gast, Jean-Robert Wilkin and our regular hosts Andrew Keith Walker and Christian Rossler for the story of how Clearstream and Eurex created this innovative CCP-cleared solution, and the largest regulated general collateral (GC) funding mechanism in Europe.

Speaker 1:

Hello and welcome back to this very special episode of the GFF podcast. Now, this is our 40th show and we're using it to celebrate the 20th anniversary of GC pooling. Yes, the hits just keep on coming this year and next year because, of course don't forget, next year is also the 30th anniversary of the gff summit, so we are having a party, it seems, every episode uh that comes out this year. But 20 years of gc pooling is a big deal. Gc pooling, of course, is a uh a channel that has become a sort of central mainstay of the euro system. It's it's fully integrated with Eurex repo, it's got clearing by Eurex clearing and it's got real-time collateral management and settlement through Clearstream. It's been instrumental in addressing capital market fragmentation in Europe and offered a homogenous funding tool and reliable repo liquidity, even during major financial crisis.

Speaker 1:

Now, for 20 yearsc, pooling has simplified secured funding with standardized baskets and predefined terms, automatic processing and the option to reuse collateral uh in central bank, uh refinancing and a bunch of other stuff too. It's the swiss army knife of global funding and financing, although please don't write in, it is German, not Swiss, like all things we take for granted now. When it started, it was a great idea that needed a lot of work and problem solving along the way. So let's go back to the early noughties, when two men came up with the idea for the GC pooling that we know and love today, and those men were Marcel Nass from Eurex, who is now a member of the executive board at Eurex Global Derivatives and MD at Crypto Finance Deutschland, and his clear stream opposite number, gerd Hartung, who was the head of new digital markets at the Deutsche Börse and now directs issuer services and new digital markets there as well. Let's hand over to Marcel to get the story rolling and let's think of GC Pooling. It didn't have a mother, but it definitely had two fathers.

Speaker 2:

Well, there was first. The starting point was when I started an electronic trading system with market participants and they were all concentrating on special repo and wanted to trade the special securities and the collateral was the cash. And then there was always the discussion about how they use GC and how is that solved. And the discussion came always in the direction when, when there would something happen, a crisis or something, then the unsecured money market, which was still the majority of the transaction for the liquidity management of the banks at this point in time, would move into repo. And that triggered me on on one side and I said, yeah, but it's struggling, because I mean, in unsecured money market you could do a 1 billion transaction and just move the cash from one account to the other. In repo, where you can allocate maximum 30 securities manually, even in an electronic system, that doesn't really help to do the sizes in cash you can do in the unsecured money market. And that was the driver of thinking how can that be changed, or can it even be changed, and and what would be needed. And that was the driver then looking into the idea and then became a vision. And the second point was I was doing software sales in a startup company after I I was a prop trader in a bank that was driving me and then we were selling risk management systems.

Speaker 2:

And there was the point everybody was looking for return on equity in the banks of above or around 25 percent in the beginning of 2000 and was the race on that, and of course investment banking was the main driver. But also the risks they're taking were quite large. So the big question in the market was can that get out of control? And what would have happened if it gets out of control? And there was the thinking of that would be great if there would be a product out there, product offering, which could then actually be cash-driven repo. Yeah, that was actually 2003,. Beginning 2003 maybe. I was talking to the market, of course the market participant and they told me well, careerstream just had created a great system for collateral allocation. It wasn't really tripartite, it was more of a market operation for the Bundesbank and it was not that widely used at that time. But the person then said that's something what you're looking for. It makes collateral allocation automatically and that's why I contacted.

Speaker 2:

2003, thyssen became part of Deutsche Börse and or 2002-2003. Then we were in closer contacts and we started to talk to each other and then, um, you know, the two fathers of a product were born, because we were then getting aligned more and more. It was not an overnight thing, you know. It was workshops and, uh, bringing thoughts together, and then this became, from from an ideavision, a reality in a project. The project took a while and a half years, until 2005, when we went live with GC Pooling as an offering, and it was I mean, it was not only technical issues, it was legal issues, regulatory issues and all to be solved that it became a product and the complexity was higher than we expected at the beginning, but we succeeded at the end and also together with market participants and a lot of experts involved, which helped to develop it.

Speaker 3:

I would start actually already 2003 and maybe a bit earlier to explain how we've come about to build GC pooling in the first place, and as many innovation. They are maybe not driven by already existing market demand but by a assumption that at a certain point there might be a market demand and then, if it really comes, then it's great fun if you have developed the right product. So, putting ourselves maybe back in the beginning of the 2000s, if you looked at repo markets at that time, much of the repo business was driven from the security end of things. So people had portfolios and they tried to finance the portfolios, transactions happening using triparty or even being completely bilateral, and then settled and managed in the back offices of the respective counterparties, and this is where the business came from. So repo was much security driven. But if you think about it, of course you can think of repo also as a cash driven transaction where people are looking for positioning their money somewhere and looking for opportunities. And particularly you could also think about some of the central bank activities that were in repo already at the time, where a treasurer of a bank, for example, would work with a central bank to raise or to position cash with the repos. And actually we on the Clistium side were very much coming from the central bank side of things because we had, with the introduction of the euro, introduced a collateral management service that was then enabling, in the first step, particularly German banks to officially work with collateral with the central bank. So we were coming from the cash side of things.

Speaker 3:

And then I bumped into Marcel who had worked on special repos, on the security side of repo transactions, and we said look, we have a very much security-driven market, but what about a scenario where, for example, the cash side becomes more important? And this is where this idea of plugging the elements that we had together came up to say you got a marketplace, you got a ccp solution, anonymous trading, if you like, through a central counterparty, and I have a cash driven collateral solution. So why not plugging that together to create an alternative product to triparty repo? So from a product point of view, it was like we're introducing a new opportunity to be prepared wherever the market goes, to be ready to offer the market what the market needed. So we launched in 2005 for the German domestic market and it was pick up, but very slowly. And then came 2007 and we had internationalized the product at that time to include Klirstein Banking, luxembourg and international assets, not only German, but European wide.

Speaker 3:

And what happened in 2007? We all know the financial crisis hit the market Now. At that time, all of a sudden, bilateral transactions were a no-go, even if collateralized. No one was trusting anyone anymore and everyone was looking for trust solutions. Cash was king, not securities. So where do I position my cash? And we got a solution where you could easily position cash through a central counterparty. You receive collateral that you could next minute reuse to the central bank to again get access to liquidity, so you could use it without facing counterparty risk and with being flexible on the cash side of things.

Speaker 3:

And this is where, actually, there was not a request for such a solution back in 2003, but because we created it, it was ready when the crisis hit the market. And this is where, then, we had a significant pickup in volumes at that stage and people onboarding to our solutions in a timeframe that we never saw before, because everyone needed to kind of come to this kind of secure solution through a CCP. So this is, I think, the real story behind market demand is not always driving innovation. It's sometimes the other way around. You have an innovative idea for different reasons, and then it's picked up later on because people think, oh, that's a cool solution, I'm going to start to use it. And then the more people see that it works, come to that solution.

Speaker 1:

Marcel Nass and Gerd Hartung there. Thanks to them. Of course, behind every great idea there's a team of people and clients who shape the development of the finished product, and to represent their stories we have Dirk Rothenbach, who's now the product manager for global securities financing at Clearstream, and two familiar voices that you'll know from previous GFF shows Too many to almost mention our old friends Carsten Hiller, who's now the head of repo sales in Europe for Eurex and FIC derivatives and repo sales, and, of course, Frank Gass, who's the head of business and product development at Eurex and a member of the management board for Eurex Repo, Although when our GC story began neither of them were actually working for Eurex. I'll let Carsten take it from there. Before we get to Carsten, Dirk's going to set the scene for us.

Speaker 4:

Actually, the first time we heard about GC pool, when we were working on the collateral management a very tiny part of the CBF collateral management unit which was at that time mainly doing pledges to Deutsche Bundesbank, and that was it basically idea came up basically of having this combination of a trading layer, central counterparty with Eurex and automatic securities allocation on using a collateral engine on the Clearstream side. And that's how it started with, also with a very small team, and then we diligently worked on the project and two years or so we did this. At that time it was still still it was before the financial crisis, so not a lot of red tape. We were able to develop things relatively fast compared to today. And then, yeah, I think into 2005,. Then we were ready for the first trade, starting with a handful of customers, basically German-based customers and one CBL-based client, and then we were sitting at the time in Frankfurthausen at the Deutsche Börse Promises and we were waiting for the first trade when Marcel Naas first introduced the idea.

Speaker 5:

At the time I was a young trader on the repo and money market desk at Dresdner Bank, dresdner Kleinwort, and, yeah, the concept immediately captured our attention. Right away we saw the potential but also raised a few essential elements which then were implemented and making also a huge part of this success story. So the importance of including collateral also from ClearSIM Banking Luxembourg so not just only focusing on the German DEI, since in ClearSIM Banking Frankfurt CBF when ensuring the seamless settlement of both securities and cash. And, crucially, the need to ring fence the collateral with a limited reuse, particular within GC pooling, for reusing the collateral against other transactions within the same basket, but most importantly also to collateralize exposures with the Deutsche Bundesbank. So these weren't just technical elements, they were functional elements and still remain key success factors, as I said, making GC pooling the liquidity hub for secured financing in Europe.

Speaker 6:

My first experience started differently than Carsten's, since I was engaged with KPMG and helping to advise Eurex repo to build up the markets as a consultant. So during that project phase I was doing some of the specifications and some nice material for Vassel and Gerd Hartung. That time for some of the board members we had to promote the idea of GC pooling, so I was kind of the external consultant helping to build that up. So this was my very first interaction and when it started off I left Deutsche Börse, went to other projects. It was helping clients to integrate GC pooling to their internal systems and to connect. So I moved on to the client side, still being a KPMG consultant.

Speaker 4:

Internally, I would say, and also with regards to the regulators. We had basically one session both with BaFin, the German regulatory entity, and Bundesbank, but this was, I would say, relatively easy. There was supporting of bringing collateralized funding, more security to the market. In terms of internal Deutsche Börse, as I said, there was less red tape, so that was relatively easy. And regarding the client, that's an interesting question. So we had, we were in touch with, basically with the repo traders, uh, muscle nasa drummed up basically a committee where we all uh sat together and talked about this and uh defined basically how the product should work.

Speaker 5:

And with this limited set of repo traders they were, they were all in, so um, and then when we went live during the first couple of years, then basically came the interesting part if and how we were able to attract new and additional customers now looking back 20 years, I think, as I said, for for us being at dresna by that time, it was an important product in which completed, as I said, our liquidity management toolbox and these efficiencies with a automated so the execution, automated settlement and also allocation of bonds. They were major advantages. And but did I see already the huge potential that it can become a 50 billion per day market? Yeah, no, not sure, but we started with, let's say, about 13 banks in the beginning. Yeah, mainly supported by the german community, but also by a few international players.

Speaker 5:

By this time and um and when I said that, uh, when I joined clearstream in 2009, um, we, together with yurex, we almost onboarded almost every bank in germany and austria. That was only triggered, or mainly triggered also by the financial crisis. We've seen around the Lehman default in 2008, what Frank already mentioned because during that time, gc pooling proved its worth. Yeah, so we were able, as Dresdner, to support also other banks with liquidity in an anonymous environment, with a central counterparty ensuring settlement and risk management at a time when some institutions couldn't find bilateral counterparties, and GC pooling kept the market moving and there, basically, we started well, but there was a limit to the growth in GC pooling for the first couple of years.

Speaker 4:

And we went to the clients, basically to the money market desk, to the traders, and we asked them would you be interested in collateralized funding, do you want to use our great new product which we have here? And actually one of the big German bank treasurers he talked to us and said well, you know, when I want to have funding, I pick up the phone and I get my billions. I don't need to go collateralized. So that was the tenure of some banks, which somehow limited the growth. And then come the financial crisis and that was a game changer that changed everything from there on. I think this was really the solution for many, many banks.

Speaker 1:

Now you might be wondering, by the way, where is my co-host, Mr Christian Rossler, for this show? Well, I have to say Christian is actually off, stress testing experimental carbon fiber mountain bikes, as he loves to do, and doing extreme sports somewhere exotic, in the mountains of somewhere that you know where Bond villains go on holiday. Yes, he is on holiday right now. Sorry, Christian, if you're listening, but I did manage to catch up with him before we left to talk about GC pooling in his career. And also I managed to catch up with another familiar voice to listeners, JR Wilkin, an old friend of the show, who's a senior advisor for collateral liquidity and lending solutions at Clearstream, to reflect on GC and how market participants look at it now. Oh, and with some extra thoughts, of course, from Frank Gast.

Speaker 7:

I think GC pooling is the ultimate money market instrument, not only because it is intermediate counterparty risk the CCP actually is built to bring back the money to the one that is lending the cash but also it is giving the reuse opportunity to the cash lender so that he doesn't sit on the collateral when there would be a default of the borrower, so he actually can reuse it and post it at the Bundesbank and so he gets again cash from the Bundesbank, so he's ultimately protected. And that's where I got first interested in GC pooling, because there was this angle to reuse the collateral with the German central bank because there was this angle to reuse the collateral with the German central bank.

Speaker 6:

I think when we saw the development during the financial crisis 2007-2008 and then the sovereign debt crisis and then ongoing, a big correlation whenever there was a crisis, gc pooling was kind of the crisis tool the market went to and it provided the efficiency for the treasury desk to manage their liquidity. It had to supply some banks to trade anonymously and we saw the potential for this market across Europe and liquidity attracts liquidity and attracts further clients. Right, and the pool has become the benchmark in Europe and we think the potential now, with more BICEP firms coming on board, is huge and there is no other market with more than 160 clients, no other market across Europe with so many participants and such a diverse set of participants participants and such a diverse set of participants.

Speaker 8:

My first vivid memory of GC pooling were two years down the road when, in 2007, we decided jointly you know, clearstream Frankfurt, clearstream Luxembourg to internationalize the product in one way, diversifying the basket of collateral, which would therefore trigger more attraction for more clients across Europe. And the diversification of the basket did kickstart the product as a truly European product, because it became obvious that you could finance through GC pooling not only German papers, but as well French, italian, spanish, and it increased over time to what it is today, 20 years later. So that's my really first memory of GC pooling, 2007, which came right on time for what was going to happen the year after, which bankers which are old enough remember very well.

Speaker 7:

I remember, in the heat of the crisis 2008, when banks were frantically trying to, you know, get out of certain repo transactions which were not intermediated by the CCP, and so it really I think that was the game changer. I think that the product was actually developed in advance and when the stress test came, it resisted, you know, and I think it proved to be the right product in the market. For that, and also, I mean later on, you know, when I mentioned that there was, it became the benchmark in the overnight, and it is still. And they also going further, there was the LIBOR crisis, which was actually manipulated by certain players in the market. So the all of this um cannot be said about, about our products. Our products are just built in order to, you know, provide transparency in the pricing and also resilience with the integrated clearing and collateral management.

Speaker 8:

What I really always look at is the overall outstanding. So now we have an outstanding of nearly 300 billion, which is the overall outstanding depending people are trading overnight or longer term because DC pooling has seen billion, which is the overall outstanding depending people are trading overnight or longer term because DC pooling has seen a lot of longer term transaction and that's. But, to be fair, I still believe that it's still not where it should be. It will go much higher. I mean, we have just seen a long period of, I would say, difficult monetary policy by the ECB, negative rates and so on, which didn't serve the product.

Speaker 8:

No, we're coming slowly. We're coming out of that period. 2% interest will probably go a bit further down and then increase again and hopefully the ECB will succeed in exiting the position they are in to be the financing arm of last resort and then leave it back to the market. And this is where I believe, with buy side and sell side meeting in centrally cleared product, I think GC pooling will be two or three times what it is today in just a few years.

Speaker 6:

So I think that's kind of those milestones. Even during the Corona outbreak or Ukraine and the Russian war, we did see a correlation of whenever there's a crisis or liquidity in the market, qe from central banks. We are kind of competing with those central bank activities and we have seen a reduction during the qe phase from 2015 to 2020, for example. But when now things have changed, a reduction in excess, liquidity rates moved up. We have seen many clients coming back and during those times where there was a reduction, we haven't seen clients terminating because they all know I need such a tool, I need the infrastructure in place. Those few terminations we had was driven by consolidation in the market. But this is also really good evidence for us to say, like it's needed and you'd report to the regulator I have access to liquidity regulator, I have access to liquidity, I have access to liquid pools.

Speaker 1:

So this part of your ratios on how you manage your your liquidity from a treasury point of view thanks to christian jr and frank, that now, of course, nothing stands still for long in today's finance landscape and in a world where the digital euro is on the horizon, where tokens and cryptocurrency is changing market infrastructure and always seem to be in the news and, in fact, you know you're getting old If you can remember going to a conference where crypto and DLT wasn't on the menu.

Speaker 1:

In fact, you know you're getting old if you've been to a conference where people weren't talking about AI, cloud and data services now. So let, if you've been to a conference where people weren't talking about AI, cloud and data services Now. So let's look at the future and get some thoughts from Marcel and Gerd in their current roles, obviously leading on new digital products, and, of course, catch up with another old friend of the show, martin Seghetti, who's a member of the Clearstream Securities Services Management Committee. He leads collateral liquidity and lending solutions at Clearstream and he's also something of an expert on the technological landscape that's transforming market infrastructure and collateral management right now.

Speaker 2:

So let's get their views on what the future looks like for GC, starting with someone who's specializing in cryptocurrencies and tokenization and HQq, lax, and you know all my favorite topics marcel, and then gerd, and then the big picture comes, with marty at the end they always say success is uh, is great visions, hard work and then the best timing you can ever have, because you can have great ideas but it never evolves after market maybe doesn't test the need for it and as the product is used and still finds new customers, I think there is potential for the future. But also the T plus one has to have some adaption, you know where. I think these kind of products where especially we can trade overnight quite nicely, but there's also instant settlement coming in with this unique TLT maybe. But there's also instant settlement coming in with this unique TLT maybe.

Speaker 3:

So you have to really investigate in what's needed at what point in time, which is not clearly answered yet.

Speaker 3:

One of the things we did last year was actually to be deeply engaged into the so-called trials or experiments of the European Central Bank for a digital euro, european Central Bank for a digital euro, where we participated with all the three clearstream entities and using all three solutions that were made available in the euro system, so Bundesbank, banque de France and Banca d'Italia.

Speaker 3:

So there's definitely movement on that front for the central bank digital currency. But then there's also the topic of stable coins that you may be aware of and which has recently obviously got an enormous push through the so-called genius act in the us um, with a new legislation coming uh to life as we speak, where the creation of, I would say, more private stable coin solutions is extremely pushed. From my perspective, and this is why I see that also tokenization of money is definitely coming. Having said that, from a Clearstream perspective, obviously we are more focusing on the security side of things, and cash is a means to set them, but we definitely will connect to these solutions and we'll be involved in that, so tokenization happening not only for assets but also for cash.

Speaker 9:

Technology is a super exciting space right now for our industry. I remember a couple of years ago one of the panelists and can't say who because of the rules that we have around the GFF Summit, but one of the panelists sort of mentioned that the repo space was fairly immune to advances in technology and that it was still a very basic, manual industry. Right, and certainly we see that. But over the last 18 months, especially, advances in data, cloud and AI are really starting to transform this industry. Right, and it's very much not buzzwords anymore. This is real, real stuff that's having a direct impact on our clients and is vastly improving both quality of life and end-state performance of optimization of collateral right, and then that directly impacts the kind of results you can get out of having a suite of things like cleared repo, uncleared repo, securities, lending, pledging, margin management all of those different tool sets in your tri-party basket. So, oscar was kind of our toe in the water, right, this was our very first attempt at something AI driven. We started working on it long before AI was even a thing. You know, it's the kind of application that we had to build with academics in a university because commercially, ai wasn't really available back in those days and uptake has been fantastic, right, the vast majority of our tri-party clients now use Oscar as a tool right, and we're continuing to evolve this, and it allows you to use a large language model in a fairly simple way to create a digital collateral basket that doesn't need to be manually implemented and it's a huge quality of life feature. But it also creates that artifact and once you have that digital collateral schedule, you can start to use it in a machine that can think about who else has similar collateral schedules. You can start to use it in a machine that can think about who else has similar collateral schedules. What else can we do with this? How else can we enhance your experience? Right, and that's where the real generative and next generation generative AI capabilities come into. What we can do, because we have these enormous data sets in collateral management that include all of the positions, all of the exposures, all of the collateral schedules across all of the users in the tripartite environment. So that's an enormous data set and something like a generative AI, when directed at that and told to optimize or to come up with ways of optimizing, can do really clever things. Right, it can start to forecast what optimization looks like. It can start to suggest to you how to shape your collateral sets. It can start to suggest to you how to change your exposures in order to achieve optimization, in order to get a better result out of that right.

Speaker 9:

So the industry is moving and has essentially moved in the last 18 months from being really a black box. People manually configured this black box. People whose job it was to do cloud optimization or funding in a bank would configure the black box and then see what came out, and there'd be this constant iterative process of trying to do it better, while both the long box and the exposure set changed in real time. So it was a very hard job. Now, what we're creating for this is a tool set that enables you to more accurately forecast, do things much faster in real time, understand what optimized looks like for you, start to then proactively source better collateral, etc. And all of that comes down to a very substantial funding cost saving for the clients, right?

Speaker 9:

So we've moved from a market that was quite static and where people took in certain considerations, like credit lines for long collateral positions, as to where they would put their securities and how they would post collateral, and now it's very much turned into a technology arms race as to who can really provide the best optimization. It's much more transparent. For the first time in quite a while, the strategy underlying the platform of the main collateral management providers is really different, right? So I don't think there's a right and a wrong, but we're certainly going to see who can start to develop the better results coming out of the next few years, as we're all putting a lot of effort into building brand new technology around this. You know.

Speaker 9:

I mean, in the last 18 months, we've completely moved our collateral platform into the cloud. We've rebuilt it entirely from a very linear service into a microservice-based platform. We've changed it from something that needs your assets to be in our accounts to something which is entirely database. We don't need the assets in an account anymore. We can do it for everything. And now we're overlaying. We have basic AI functionality and now we're overlaying much, much more complicated AI functionality on top of that. So this industry is going to look totally different in about a year's time would be my expectation.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so we're now at the end of this special 20th anniversary show for GC Pooling, but you know we love our crystal ball questions on this show, and so let's get a little bit of crystal ball gazing just before we go, from our GC leaders at Eurex, carsten and Frank, and also from Marty again, and let's have some thoughts about where GC is going as we face uncertain times in the markets.

Speaker 5:

I still see a huge potential for GC pooling, especially now, as we are now again in a more normal rates environment. Also, from a liquidity point of view, excess liquidity is coming down. We see already not only more cash providers stepping in, but also cash takers, so banks having again a natural need to refinance their inventory. So the future is bright.

Speaker 6:

If you think GC pooling is working on a voluntary basis. Everybody is talking about the US and mandatory clearing, but this product works in the cleared environment because people believe and see the benefits of it and they really need it. And it's complementary to your bilateral repo or tripartite repo and whenever there was a crisis, we have seen some limitations in the repo markets on the bilateral or tripartite side, but GC pooling did operate well lateral tripartite side, but gc pooling did operate well.

Speaker 9:

Gc is a super viable tool because of the way that it mitigates risk, the way that it provides balance sheet optimization and, specifically to clear stream urex, because of how liquid it is. Right, it's the most liquid gc pooling product on the market. So liquidity attracts liquidity and always will. Right, it's very hard to change that. So if you have a platform like GC Pooling, which is super, super liquid, it will attract more volume and more flow. So, as a product, the concept of cleared repo, in my perspective, is only going to increase in importance going forward, given geopolitics, in my perspective, is only going to increase in importance going forward. Given geopolitics, given monetary policy, given the way that banks have to manage balance sheet and also given the regulatory drive towards a more secure market, I think that's absolutely going to be the case. What clients will benefit from is they will start to benefit from enhancers and advancements in technology that will enable them to extract more benefits from liquidity channels like this.

Speaker 1:

Okay. Well, that is the end of the show. Thanks to everyone who's helped bring this show together, and that's Marcel Nass, gerd Hartung, dirk Rothenberg, carsten Hiller, frank Gass, jr Wilkin, jean-robert Wilkin there, martin Szigeti and, of course, my co-host, mr Christian Rossler. And don't forget to join us on our LinkedIn channel, that's linkedincom slash company, slash Clearstream, where you can find out more about our GC pooling 20th anniversary celebrations Plus, of course, the latest news from Clearstream and, of course, from me, andrew Keith Walker. I want you to have a good month, have a safe month, and we'll be back in September, but in the meantime, I'm going to leave you with some final thoughts about life, the universe and product development from our three men who started the show Marcel, gert and Dirk. We'll see you next time, bye-bye.

Speaker 2:

With the systems we're using, with the harmonization of all these topics or or or what you can see as well, having the collateral experts together with the trading and the clearing experts. That means we have really the right people to solve issues over time and therefore I strongly believe that growth can continue. How much further? I don't know, maybe doubling or or not, but depending also on interest rates. We don't know how the monetary policy will work in the future. How digital currencies should we shoot in, either from central banks or cryptocurrencies? We have to see that as how that evolves in the future and I think that can all be adapted in the right way.

Speaker 3:

Of course, when we started the exercise, we had no clue that it would go down that route. You always had that vision that it could be very beneficiary for the market to have this kind of centralized, risk mitigating, anonymous solution to easily manage cash. We're always convinced that this is the right idea, but obviously we did not know when this would become really extremely important for institutions, given market circumstances. So if you wouldn't have had the financial crisis, maybe you would still be very much into security driven repos and specials and everyone would trust everyone easily across the whole planet, and then we would be nowhere. So so I think we should always be conscious that, even though we may have good ideas, they very much also depend on external developments that we don't influence, to be honest. So we should not overestimate the effect of our visions.

Speaker 4:

Listen to your customers, listen what they want and really understand, not basically saying, oh, we finalized, we finished the concept, now we have to build it one-to-one. It's too late to change anything, but really to actively throughout the development process until late stages actually really talk, involve your customers, listen to your customers and really give them what they want. I think this is the most valuable lesson that I personally learned from GC Pooling development team and special guests expressing their personal opinions, not the opinions of Clearstream as an organization.

Speaker 1:

There's no representation made as to the accuracy or completeness of information in this podcast, and nor should it be taken as any legal, tax or other professional advice. See you next time.