Towards an European integrated financial market: the impact of the settlement platform T2S

Towards an European integrated financial market: the impact of the settlement platform T2S The European Central Bank (ECB) will offer to banks in 2015 an european shared platform for securities settlement, named TARGET 2 Securities (T2S), in order to open the national financial markets. This paper develops a spatial competition model to understand the impact of this new organisation on european post-trading services. We analyse the incentives of the Central Securities Depositaries (CSD) to move to T2S when they become competitors in the market for settlement services and remain in a dominant position for depositary services. Settlement and depositary services are complementary because banks have to pay for these two services to buy or sell a security. We show that such a reform should induce a decrease in the settlement price and more generally in the post-trading prices, but that prices depend strongly on the market organisation and on the attractivity of T2S. Under certain conditions, partial adhesion would make prices increase and this configuration appears as a Nash equilibrium. As CSDs are free to adhere to T2S, the ECB might be forced to regulate the settlement prices. JEL classification: D43; G15; G20