Bringing a Tradition of Innovation to the Global Markets Beyond liquidity, long-term success in financial markets also requires the ability to innovate and adapt to changing market conditions. At Freddie Mac, we have a long tradition of innovation. We established the norms for documenting and underwriting home mortgages. More recently, we pioneered the new standard in automated underwriting, Freddie Mac s Loan Prospector. Our underwriting service, now accessible via the Internet, enables lenders to originate mortgages with less documentation, at a lower cost, and in a fraction of the previous time.
Innovation also drives our global borrowing strategies.
And last summer, Freddie Mac announced the world s first corporate Financing Calendar. This innovation added predictability and transparency to our borrowing activities, and facilitated the development of term-repo, strips and futures markets another first for corporate debt. In January, we launched a new program for short-term borrowing called Reference Bills. Per our calendar, we conduct regular, Internet-based auctions of these bills in maturities of one, two, three, six and 12 months. At the present time, we are the only major corporate supplier of a full yield curve of short-term debt.