**4.8 The European bond market**

The financial services business in Europe as a whole is undergoing fast transformations because of numerous primary driving forces. The most obvious example is *Perspective Chapter: International Financial Markets and Financial Capital Flows... DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.102572*

(EMU), but liberalization continues apace, and technology is entering an exponential transition phase that may well allow for substantial disintermediation of many aspects of the financial system. The paper's first section provides an outline of the specific changes that appear to be most likely to alter the market structure within which the (ECB) will have to operate its monetary policy. Naturally, the first set of modifications were those necessary to run a monetary union with a population of 300 million people [16, 34].

Several other fundamental causes have been at work in the background at the same time, with the full implications only becoming apparent in the medium term. Nonetheless, the implications have the potential to have a significant impact on monetary policy implementation; therefore, they should be closely monitored [46].

The (ECB's) Technical Actions the (ECB) made several technical steps as part of its (EMU) preparations to ensure that its monetary policy could be implemented effectively. Some of these improvements may have happened spontaneously over time, as technology became more widely available, causing cost-cutting pressures to force market participants to adopt these techniques. Nonetheless, (EMU) sped up the following critical steps [17]:

