On 1 February 2022, on the day of the go-live of CSDR cash penalties, ICMA’s European Repo and Collateral Council (ERCC) released its discussion paper, Optimising Settlement Efficiency, aiming to focus attention on key opportunities to strengthen settlement efficiency in Europe. ICMA's Alex Westphal, Secretary to the ERCC, provides some background to the initiative and briefly walks through the key take aways from the paper and next steps.