EBA announces details of its 2017 EU-wide transparency exercise

The European Banking Authority (EBA) announced today that it will publish data for its fourth annual EU-wide transparency exercise in December 2017 together with the Risk Assessment Report (RAR). Nearly 600000 data points in total on more than 130 banks will be released, covering all key balance sheet items. The transparency exercise is part of the EBA's efforts to foster market discipline, improve the understanding of the EU banking system and ensures both a detailed snap shot and consistent time series.

 

Running a transparency exercise on an annual basis guarantees a wide coverage of disclosure in terms of banks and countries as well as continuity of the time series of semi-annual bank-by-bank financial information, which the EBA started in 2011. 

 

The sample of banks for the 2017 exercise will be aligned with the one used in the 2017 EBA RAR and the exercise will be based exclusively on supervisory reporting data. Therefore, banks will not be required to report any additional data, which will significantly reduce the burden for them. 

 

The data will refer to December 2016 and June 2017, keeping a semi-annual time series of data disclosure, and will show financial information on capital, leverage ratio, risk exposure amounts, profit and losses, market risk, securitisation, credit risk, exposures to sovereign, non-performing exposures and forborne exposures. Leverage ratio is a new item in 2017 as it is now available in supervisory reporting.

 

The exercise will be launched in September 2017, when the interaction with the banks in the sample for the verification of the data will start. The data will be frozen at the end of October 2017 and the EBA expects to publish it in early December 2017, together with the EBA 2017 RAR.