sustained rise in market rates could translate into a tightening of wider financing conditions that are relevant for the entire economy. such a tightening would be premature and would pose a risk to the ongoing economic recovery and the outlook for inflation. against this background, at its meeting on 10 june the governing council decided to confirm its very accommodative monetary policy stance. in particular, based on our joint assessment, we expect to continue to conduct net asset purchases under the pandemic emergency purchase programme ( pepp ) over the coming quarter at a significantly higher pace than during the first months of the year. our comprehensive package of complementary measures has proven effective in preserving favourable financing conditions for all sectors of the economy, which is essential for supporting a sustained economic recovery and safeguarding price stability. asset purchases under the pepp have helped to stabilise financial markets and ensured a smooth transmission of our monetary policy to the key interest rates that determine the funding costs for businesses and households. meanwhile, our targeted longer - term refinancing operations ( tltro ) have provided banks with funding on favourable terms provided that they sustain their lending to customers. the total amount borrowed in eurosystem refinancing operations stands at around eur 2. 2 trillion. since the outbreak of the pandemic, this has been almost exclusively concentrated in the third series, known as tltro iii. in all, tltro iii is expected to contribute to increasing lending volumes by over 4 percent cumulatively and to lowering lending rates by more than 60 basis points. without our measures, we would have faced a much worse growth and inflation outlook, subject to significantly greater risks. according to our conservative estimate, the measures taken by the ecb since march 2020 on asset purchases and tltro will cumulatively increase inflation by around 1. 2 percentage points and real gdp growth by around 1. 8 percentage points between 2020 and 2023. 2 / 4 bis central bankers'speeches the asset purchases and tltro also strengthen the effectiveness of the other measures in our toolbox, including the negative interest rate policy, which you asked me to discuss today. we have clear evidence that cutting the deposit facility rate below zero percent has provided additional economic stimulus as it has fed into lower lending rates, thereby helping to improve overall financing conditions for firms and households. of course, despite these positive effects, negative interest rates have often been criticised because of their potential adverse side effects. on the whole, however, our assessment of our experience

the take - up of our tools. 2 / 6 bis - central bankers'speeches one way of fostering the adoption of tools is our european banking supervision - wide suptech champions initiative. under this initiative, pete and other colleagues at the ncas and in various business areas across ecb banking supervision can become trained experts in suptech tools. these suptech champions can then provide local and easy - to - access support to users. they also collect feedback and identify user needs in order to further develop the tool. in this way, suptech champions act as ambassadors, both promoting awareness and supporting the use and development of suptech tools. already, 45 champions across 17 ncas have reached over 1, 000 supervisors through multiple channels, including workshops and providing guidance on the use of suptech tools. future - proofing our organisation second, we are continuing to make our organisation ready for the future by establishing a steady - state tech function that connects internal tech and supervision experts across business areas and ncas. we want to cultivate a collaborative approach to shaping ssm technology and enhancing the adoption and use of available tools. in one of our flagship initiatives, ncas can become suptech centres, which are at the forefront of developing technology for european banking supervision. they deliver tools that can subsequently be made available to the ecb and other ncas. a case in point is that one nca has developed a new use case for assessing the group structures of banks over time in our network analysis platform, navi, which benefits european banking supervision as a whole. deepening our global partnerships third, we seek to tap into the global innovation networks with which we have established strong ties in recent years. for instance, we have been working closely with leading academic institutions to deliver state - of - the - art training to supervisors on machine learning, programming for data analytics, prompting and other topics. we are also working closely with industry leaders in other areas, such as generative ai, cloud technology and big data, as well as with start - ups to bring the latest and most advanced technologies to banking supervision. at the same time, we are partnering with other authorities across the world to experiment with new ways of solving common problems. such partnerships mean that pete has access to knowledge and state - of - the art technology that boost efficiency and improve supervisory outcomes, which brings me to the second pillar of our strategy, technology. technology through our ssm tech strategy, we want to