 Thank you Cornelia, and it's a pleasure to be here today to discuss such an important issue facing financial markets. As Cornelia said, I'll just briefly discuss some of the steps that people can take to start to prepare for transition as set out in the global iBOR benchmark survey. A short introduction to ICMA before I begin, so we are a trade association promoting resilient, well functioning, international and globally coherent cross-border debt securities markets. We have members including private and public sector issuers, financial intermediaries, asset managers, other investors, capital market infrastructure providers, central banks, law firms and others worldwide. We've been focusing on benchmark reform and transition for many, many years now. We're pleased to be a non-voting member of the working group on euro risk-free rates, and we're also participating in the working groups in the UK and the Swiss area and staying in touch with our members worldwide as you might expect. So it's clear from the presentations we've heard today and previous remarks that there is a need for all market participants to prepare for benchmark transition. This view has also been expressed by regulators in the US and the UK and elsewhere in the context of LIBOR. Benchmark transition will therefore involve a global effort across multiple jurisdictions, currencies and products. It's going to be quite a challenge, and we all have a part to play in this transition. It's very important that market participants inform themselves of the various issues and start to prepare, and it's a great step that you're all here today. So in June this year, ISDA, AFME, SIFMA, SIFMA AMG and ICMA published an IBOR global benchmark transition report with the help of EY. The report is publicly available on all of our websites and I do encourage you to read it along with the transition roadmap that was published just before the report. So the report contains information obtained from a survey of buy and sell side institutions in the cash and derivatives markets, both wholesale and retail, financial entities, corporate entities, other end users, infrastructure providers and law firms, so it's pretty broad ranging. It was intended to gauge the state of market readiness and identify the challenges and potential solutions for an orderly, efficient and coordinated transition. The report highlights the need for market participants to take immediate action. With every new IBOR or EONIA trade executed, the extent of the market's reliance on those benchmarks increases and the transition challenge increases. The report provides a detailed implementation checklist that you can use to track your progress towards benchmark transition and there are five elements in that checklist which I'll just briefly describe now and are up on the slide. So first, establish a formal transition programme. This is likely to involve appointing a senior executive to manage a multi-year transition programme, establishing a robust governance structure for the programme, allocating budget, confirming staffing needs, defining your programme work streams and initiating internal stakeholder education and to be clear this is likely to involve multiple teams across your businesses in the case of international businesses that will be a global effort. Second, assess your exposure to affected benchmarks. So this is likely to involve developing an inventory of products, financial instruments and contracts linked to affected benchmarks, quantifying the exposure to those benchmarks across core business lines and products and calculate that exposure that's anticipated to roll off prior to key dates 2019, 2020 and 2021 and then evaluate your operations by assessing the impact on processes, data and importantly technology. You might also want to implement internal reporting to monitor your exposure to affected benchmarks throughout the transition period. Now the third step is to analyse your contracts. Someone mentioned earlier that transition might involve lawyers to the lowest extent possible. I think here perhaps it's obvious that we may need to involve lawyers to some degree. You'll need to involve your lawyers to review existing contracts to assess the status of your current fallback provisions by product and contract type and determine where contracts require repapering. So as we've heard today, your IBO is in the process of being reformed but in the meantime sufficient safeguards should be established in all contracts to mitigate the risk of potential adverse scenarios and indeed in some cases the benchmark regulation requires this. The IBO global benchmark transition report also notes that involvement with industry working groups for example via trade associations should also be considered. The fourth point is to consider your communication with external parties. So this might involve developing a communication strategy for clients and identifying external parties that need to be involved in your firm's transition. So this might involve for example your technology vendors. They might need a significant lead time to update their systems that they provide to you for example. Last but not least, the suggestion is that you define a transition roadmap. This is likely to involve developing an implementation plan with key projects, milestones and responsibilities. You might also wish to consider keeping up to date with OSSG and RFR working group publications. We've had a lot today about the focus on transparency in the euro area and I think the other working groups and other jurisdictions would also take that approach as well. You can find minutes of working group meetings for example on the ECB website, Bank of England website, ARC website etc. You might also wish to think about contributing to the demand for design of and trading in new products that reference alternative RFRs such as ESTA in due course. So to conclude, the IBOR global benchmark transition report sets out a useful implementation checklist that individual market participants can use in their benchmark transition planning. Market participants are being strongly encouraged to prepare actively for benchmark transitions. In the words of Benoit Cuire, financial market participants on their part should redouble their efforts to ensure a smooth transition and time is running short. Thank you. Thank you very much indeed. I'm director general for fines for European investment bank meaning that I'm in charge of the funding liquidity management back office, middle office asset liability management of this institution. I'm actually also a board member of ICMA so I'm quite happy to speak after a representative of this excellent association. It's a great pleasure for me to be invited to speak here today. It's a pleasure that is almost tainted with some angst because I'm conscious to be your last obstacle to your weekend preparation. So I'll try to be brief. I'm sure that a lot of you are cringing now because when somebody says I'll be brief usually the other way around but I'll try to keep up to my promise. The European investment bank is an invited member of the Euro risk rate working group and as such I must say that it has witnessed considerable progress in the global thinking about this question of rate succession and benchmark succession. At the same time it's certainly a program, an adventure that is still in the making that is still full of unknowns and uncertainties and I would say that the main message I will start with is that these uncertainties are not a reason not to do anything that actually we are now we've met progress enough to start now to prepare actively and that I would like to do today is to explain how the market practitioner, market member like the Yabi is starting to get ready to prepare for this transformation. So in my presentation today I will first of all share a few ideas about the analysis of interdependencies, the analysis of the field play that we have to work with. Then I'll give you some ideas of what we are doing or what we've done and maybe also what we still have to do, what we haven't done yet and then I'll give you a bit of more focus on one of these things we've done which is resenditions of a GBP Sonya floating rate note. So first of all I think it's very important to start analyze when you start working on how to get ready and how to prepare to start looking at the interdependencies. As a bank we basically we are financial intermediaries so we channel money from agents in financial surplus, typically investors who buy EIB bonds in our case to agents, economic agents who are in financial deficit, typically our private sector and public sector borrowers. And of course if our investors for example don't follow the developments in the interest rate benchmarks and if they continue to prefer buying instruments that refer to old benchmarks it's not going to incentivize us as an issuer to work actively on this succession. So certainly we have to have an interactive interaction with investors in order to promote visions of bond referencing the new benchmarks and to actively explore market solutions to deal with the legacy bond that would refer to old benchmarks. Similarly with our borrowers if they don't start themselves to prepare for the transition to the new benchmark it's not going to help us either as a lender it's not going to help us to initiate the discussions that we need to have with them at some point to amend our existing loan contracts and to actively explore the opportunity of introducing to them new reference rates lending contracts. And we also need actually interaction under collaboration of market infrastructures because if they don't innovate and they don't develop alternative hedging solutions it's not going to help us to make progress and to help the market community to be steered out of the old benchmark. Similarly we need industry associations and working groups to elaborate and formulate practical solutions, workable solutions to smooth transition. We need the regulators and legislators. We need them to take into account the practical constraints that the stakeholders market practitioners are facing for an orderly transition. It's very interesting regulators to avoid any way chaos and to have a smooth transition and we may need them to set rules for this transition and to make rules for the statements of discontinuation for example. One last words on this analysis of interrelationships and interdependencies. First of all regulators and legislators have said that this process should be market driven and driven by market practitioners which is very good and in a way thanks to their associations and working groups markets are indeed able to develop a lot. But we will need the guidance of regulators anyway and what is very important is that these guidance is from the associations and from the regulators converge harmoniously and for that I must say that this working group is a very important forum that certainly is still needed. The other thing I would like to say is that the level of preparation is still very unequal and even today actually the composition of this audience shows it. There is an angle that is not yet much engaged into the process which is basically the corporates especially the smaller ones and even more the retail clients and that makes me think that this kind of event has to be repeated in the future and actually I discussed that briefly with you Cornelian with Ben Wahoo who is already starting his recon preparation maybe because we I don't know but we should repeat this event and perhaps decline this event capitalizing on the existence of a network of national central banks and also a network of national relays of the industry associations to really be able to engage more with the SMEs and with the retail clients. To give you an example we are monitoring already the demand for our clients and at the moment those clients were speaking were asking here be about new rates new reference rates for the continue is actually only a handful of them so so definitely there's still work to do. Now that I've explained all these interdependencies let's turn to what we've tried to do already at my institution. First of all we did what the SCMA did as well so we started to list all the uncertainties and all the unknowns and it's a work that can be a bit discouraging at the beginning and I can tell you that I heard some of my colleagues on not only at the DAB actually but also outside basically saying why the hell are we doing all that it was working so well. We know since and it was explained this morning that it was not working that well and actually it was working well on the very dodgy foundations and that now we're working to something that will be much better founded but nevertheless it is true that the listing of unknowns is something that is a bit formidable on the first outlook but needs to needs to be done actually once it's done it's relatively reassuring because conceptually the list is easy to grasp. So on the basis of this list that I'm not going to repeat we then started to work and to be fair we're starting to work not so long ago if only because some of the uncertainties were too uncertain until a few months ago so we started basically at the beginning of this year in February to set up a project and the responsibility of the asset liability committee there's an asset liability committee at VAV like in every I would say in every bank I'm the chair of this ALCO and all the services mainly impacted by this evolution are now embarked into a special ALCO project where we look at all these angles the first thing we did and we've done that I would say we've done three quarters of that so it's but it's very important I think to start with it is to measure our current exposure in economic terms to the different interest rate benchmarks so it's a mapping exercise actually where per currency where per rate per maturity we figure the gross nominal exposure the gross outstanding nominal amount I would say what is interesting is then to get to a second level which is the measure of a net outstanding amount which we are still working on but the gross has been done already the gross mapping has been done already and in the main at the same time we've already conducted an assessment of the existing fallback provisions that we have already in our contracts for the different asset and liability classes now in term of action plan we have divided our internet our project into five work streams which are more or well advanced and which I will now describe a little bit more whereas one work stream is a bit evident it's the monitoring of key developments so we just have we have some sort of a control tower team that is monitoring what's going on in the various markets it's a continuous process that is time consuming but absolutely necessary and we also value an alias we value the opportunity to be part of different working groups which are excellent opportunities to discuss and share information there's a business business work stream on the funding side we we actually explore the possibility to issue bonds that refer to new benchmarks we did that in June in GBP and I will turn back to that later on we also look listen to what various working groups are proposing or starting to propose for the management of legacy bonds referencing to old benchmarks in our case I must say that this is a risk that is of a limited size fortunately but there is still a few floating rate notes that have a majority beyond 21 on the lending side we are currently concentrating our efforts on introducing fallback provisions in our master lending contracts and to and beyond that we know that we we have to enter then a phase of bilateral discussion with with clients in case of discontinuation of some of these indices and before entering this negotiation phase that what we should do probably and we have not done that yet is to establish to to prepare a communication strategy to our clients to to to already put them into into to tell them how we're going to proceed and why we're going to proceed on the treasury and asset liability management side while it's mostly market monitoring monitoring hedging solution we are looking at we are looking forward to the conclusions of the is the consultation on fallback provisions and protocol on legacy trade so at the moment it's more I would say it's more monitoring than than uh else we uh we are also there's another work stream on the valuation uh the risk management the valuation and the accounting of uh uh and the impact on these fields on the new uh reference rates the introduction of new reference rate benchmarks actually it will introduce new types of positions new types of interest rate basis that haven't been exposed so far and are actually naturally ignored by our risk management framework so we have to we have to adapt risk risk management frameworks we we have also to prepare for the for changes or evolutions in the way instruments like interest rate derivatives will be valued so we've started already internal discussions about that we will have to also adapt our fund transfer system fund fund transfer pricing system uh to uh these new interest rates uh and to uh price we will have to prepare the pricing of our loans to the measurement of the contribution of our new of our different activities in case of of a permanent continuation of some of the benchmarks we're using today on the legal and documentation side we are at the moment mostly monitoring what market is developing in terms of market standards and finally there's a work stream which is data on IT applications at this moment it's too early for us to embark into a detailed plan on our art systems IT systems but we have already earmarked in our budget planning for 2019 we've already earmarked actually a budget for for for accommodation of our art systems to new interest rate benchmarks this actually makes me say that all this requires at some level and I'm sure it's the case with you an engagement of our governance so this mapping for example that we've done of our risk exposures is some something that we are informing our management of and and of course we are exposing them to the need of for example setting up a budget contingency for uh investment in 2019 now I'm almost done and I'll just say a few words of one of the highlights of the thing we've done so far which is this issuance of sonia floater it's actually a project we started last year so it's been a long project to develop and probably and hopefully now that the markets become more and more attuned to the reality that benchmarks will change probably will be quicker for all the new experiments but these experiments with sonia started with us in April 2017 and came in realization to to full realization only I would say one year one year later I think we'll be quicker for nesta for not no estus reo soffa trail but sorry for that but to um to to ensure this uh successful check and let's say trade with a new interest rate we had to engage actually with market market constituents from the public side we had to discuss with the bank of england for the if only for the report eligibility with the fca with the uk dmu with the investors with banks with industry working groups and we did that in two stages we first did a quasi lab experiment it was a two million only issuance in march it was a five year floating rate note and then we looked at how it went actually we discovered very interesting questions for example the report eligibility of this bond was legally absolutely impeccable but the systems did not allow it because the system did not provide for the possibility to recognize the existence of a sonia floating rate note so this is very interesting to discover but it's better to discover that on a lab size exercise and so this very small issuance and then we uh so when we thanks to this experiment we were more or less sure that our system but also other system could handle the threat properly that the paying agent could run a coupon calculation properly that the investors could book a transaction on value of the bond properly that the bond could be repaid properly that the deal structure was actually meeting market demand we did this full size new issuance a five year issuance with a specificity of paying coupons linked to sonia and not to labor and we had to make choices and we made a choice that these coupons are quarterly and set equal to the compounded daily sonia with a five day lag and this seems to have served up some sort of market reference to other issuance since then I'll stop there I hope I'm up to my promise of being not too not too long um it's been a very interesting day I must say uh again regulators worldwide are telling us that this reform should be market led uh this will succeed only if we all prepare for it and here I think this room is full of people who are rather well prepared but we still have to work with others as well thank you very much