Bundesbank President Jens Weidmann will become the new Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Basel-based Bank for International Settlements (BIS). His three-year term of office will begin on 1 November. He is succeeding Christian Noyer, who will retire as governor of the Banque de France at the end of October.

On 31 August 2015, the Italian central securities depository, Monte Titoli, together with the Italian banking community, successfully migrated to the new European securities settlement platform TARGET2-Securities (T2S). This marked a further milestone on the road towards the creation of a European hub for securities settlement in Europe and also signified the completion of the first migration wave.

Whether supplying cash to the economy, being actively involved in banking supervision or giving talks to the general public under the rubric of economic education, the Bundesbank is on hand as a service provider, supervisor and information provider at approximately 40 locations throughout Germany.

Following a period of fairly robust growth in the German economy in the first two quarters of 2015, the Bundesbank's economists expect gross domestic product to continue its positive development in the second half of the year. Growth in the second quarter was chiefly due to buoyant exports.

Bundesbank President Jens Weidmann has called for the greater integration of European financial markets. Higher capital requirements for systemically important financial institutions, a functioning resolution mechanism, an end to the preferential regulatory treatment of sovereign debt and the removal of regulatory and tax barriers for capital markets - particularly for equity capital markets - are key prerequisites for this, he said.

The emerging market economies have grown significantly over the past 20 years, increasingly becoming the engine fuelling global growth. Recently, however, economic momentum in China, Russia and other countries has tailed off considerably. In the July Monthly Report, the Bundesbank's economists look into the drivers behind this development.

The number of counterfeit euro banknotes seized by the Bundesbank in the first half of 2015 was up 31% on the second half of 2014. However, measured against the amount of cash in circulation in Germany, the incidence of counterfeits remained low, said Bundesbank Executive Board member Carl-Ludwig Thiele. Of all the denominations, €20 and €50 banknotes were counterfeited particularly frequently.

Bundesbank President Jens Weidmann has spoken out against increasing the liquidity assistance provided by the Eurosystem to Greece. If short-term assistance was thought to be necessary, it was up to politicians to provide it, he said at a Bundesbank conference in Frankfurt am Main. Greece needed to keep capital controls in place until an appropriate support package had been agreed by all parties and the solvency of both the Greek government and the Greek banking system had been ensured, said Mr Weidmann.

Bundesbank Executive Board member Andreas Dombret has asked German banks to step up their efforts in digitalising the industry. German banks should also be making greater investments in IT security in order to protect customer data, he said to an audience of around 700 representatives from banking supervision and the banking industry who attended the Bundesbank's 19th banking symposium in Frankfurt.

1 July 1990 marked the day on which the Deutsche Mark was introduced as the official currency in the then German Democratic Republic and became a symbol of German unity. The Bundesbank played a crucial role in the currency changeover.