Worldline, the European market leader in payment and transactional services, is proud to announce that CREDEM, one of Italy's leading private banks, has successfully started processing Target2 payments with Worldline’s Payment and Liquidity Hub software CRISTAL. Thanks to this forward-looking move, CREDEM is well prepared for the TARGET Consolidation project[1] initiated by the European Central Bank (ECB): the next CRISTAL version, which is delivered in June, will ensure the smooth upgrade to the future ECB TARGET platform, for the pan-European migration planned by the ECB in November 2021.

As part of its evolution program for Investment Banking, CREDEM has migrated the processing of Euro high-value payments (HVP) to CRISTAL Proactive Liquidity Manager, Worldline’s software package for intraday liquidity management, connection to Target2 and control of payment outflow. With CRISTAL, CREDEM implements an operational infrastructure to master intraday liquidity risks. The software combines liquidity forecast and monitoring, control of payment outflow and comprehensive use of market infrastructures’ liquidity tools under application-to-application mode.

By using CRISTAL, CREDEM has already implemented its future architecture required to manage the impact of the ECB’s TARGET Consolidation. The next CRISTAL version will be delivered by Worldline in 2020 to CREDEM and other banks that are using CRISTAL to date, including major European banks which are rated as Target Critical Participants by the ECB. As of 2020, CRISTAL will provide comprehensive support of the new ECB system’s features to improve liquidity management and to process high-value payments under ISO 20022 standard format. It will also include features such as a format conversion facility and the capability to support both the legacy and future formats.

CREDEM also has started live operations with Worldline’s CRISTAL Collateral Management module to manage eligible collateral assets mobilised at Banca d’Italia and to monitor credit headroom on central money market. That component of the project also constitutes a step forward to prepare for the later implementation of the harmonised European Collateral Management System (ECMS)[2] planned by the ECB in 2022.

Michael Steinbach, Managing Director of Financial Services at Worldline, said: “ Continuous evolution of our state of the art software products is part of Worldline’s commitment to support the banking industry in meeting regulatory challenges like the deadlines set by the European Central Bank and SWIFT. We have been working hard on facilitating the adoption of the ISO 20022 standard for high-value and cross-border payments through the new version of CRISTAL and are proud the success of its first implementation at CREDEM.”