- First release of aggregated supervisory statistics on less significant institutions, complementing and mirroring existing statistics on significant institutions
- New statistics cover key indicators on capital, profitability, liquidity and asset quality
- Time series of data to start from second quarter of 2020, with quarterly updates
The European Central Bank (ECB) has released a new set of aggregated banking statistics covering less significant institutions (LSIs). The LSI statistics complement the existing supervisory banking statistics on significant institutions (SIs) that have been published by the ECB since 2016. The LSI statistics offer a unique supervisory perspective and enhance transparency under the Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM).
Within the SSM, SIs are directly supervised by the ECB, while the national competent authorities hold responsibility for the direct supervision of LSIs, including quality assurance for their supervisory reporting, which is the source of the new LSI statistics. The ECB is, however, responsible for authorising LSIs across the euro area and, through its LSI oversight function, ensures effective and consistent European banking supervision.
Mirroring the structure of the SI statistics, the LSI statistics cover key indicators on capital, profitability, liquidity and asset quality. The indicators can be explored visually via an interactive dashboard, which provides an overview of the latest developments in these areas, and allows users to analyse time series as well as select either SI or LSI samples. The full dataset for the new LSI statistics, with granular time series going back to the second quarter of 2020, is available via the ECB’s Statistical Data Warehouse and will be updated on a quarterly basis.
Methodology and interpretation
It is important to note that LSIs vary greatly across countries participating in European banking supervision in terms of number of institutions, volume of assets and business models, with implications for the comparability of LSI country aggregates. Entities acting as financial market infrastructure providers (central counterparties and central securities depositories) have been excluded from the LSI statistics to avoid biases, as their size usually exceeds the significance threshold, even though they may not be classified as SIs.
Supervisory banking statistics are calculated by aggregating the data that are reported by banks which report COREP (capital adequacy information) and FINREP (financial information) at the relevant point in time. Consequently, changes from one quarter to the next can also be influenced by the following factors:
- changes in the sample of reporting institutions;
- mergers and acquisitions;
- reclassifications (e.g. portfolio shifts as a result of certain assets being reclassified from one accounting portfolio to another).
Users of the new LSI statistics may wish to consult the methodological note of LSI Supervisory Banking Statistics and the definitions of the ITS data points in Supervisory Banking Statistics for more detailed information on methodological aspects in order to better analyse and interpret the data.
ecb.europa.eu
