Press releases

The European Banking Authority (EBA) published today an Opinion setting out how prudential supervisors should consider money laundering and terrorist financing (ML/TF) risks in the context of the Supervisory Review and Evaluation Process (SREP). This Opinion forms part of the EBA’s ongoing work to strengthen the fight against money laundering and terrorist financing in Europe.

The European Banking Authority (EBA) published today its second report on how the industry has implemented the EBA Guidelines on Product Oversight and Governance Arrangements (POG). It identifies good practices of financial institutions and concludes that many of them do not sufficiently put the required focus on ensuring that consumers’ needs are met in line with the Guidelines. Therefore, the EBA encourages financial institutions to ensure that the interests, objectives and characteristics of consumers are taken into account when applying POG arrangements, in order to avoid consumer detriment.

The European Banking Authority (EBA) published today a Discussion Paper on Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) risks management and supervision aiming to collect feedback for the preparation of its final report on the topic. The Discussion Paper provides a comprehensive proposal on how ESG factors and ESG risks could be included in the regulatory and supervisory framework for credit institutions and investment firms. The consultation runs until 3 February 2021.

The European Banking Authority (EBA) launched today a public consultation on revised Guidelines on sound remuneration policies.  This review takes into account the amendments introduced by the fifth Capital Requirements Directive (CRD V) in relation to institutions’ sound remuneration policies and in particular the requirement that those remuneration policies should be gender neutral. The consultation runs until 29 January 2021.

The European Banking Authority (EBA) published today its first monitoring Report on minimum requirement for own funds and eligible liabilities (MREL) and total loss absorbing capacity (TLAC) instruments. The purpose of this Report is to inform stakeholders about the implementation review performed by the EBA on TLAC / MREL instruments so far and to present its views and current recommendations on specific features commonly seen in these instruments. This Report follows the same approach of the reports regularly published on CET1 and AT1 monitoring of issuances.

​​​​​​​The European Banking Authority (EBA) issued today an Opinion to clarify the prudential treatment of the so-called ‘legacy instruments” in view of the end of the grandfathering period on 31 December 2021. In its Opinion, the EBA proposes policy options to address the infection risk when created by such instruments. The EBA’s recommendations aim at ensuring a high quality of capital for EU institutions and a consistent application of rules and practices across the Union.

The European Banking Authority (EBA) published today an Opinion following the notification by Finansinspektionen, the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority (FSA), of its intention to extend a measure introduced in 2018, which aims at enhancing the resilience of Swedish banks to potential severe downward corrections in residential real estate markets. Based on the evidence submitted, the EBA does not object to the extension of such measure, which Finansinspektionen intends to apply to credit institutions that have adopted the Internal Rating-Based (IRB) Approach. The extension will be applied from 31 December 2020 until 30 December 2021.

The European Banking Authority (EBA) launched today a public consultation to propose revising the Guidelines on major incident reporting under the Payment Service Directive (PSD2). The proposal aims at optimising and simplifying the reporting process, capturing additional relevant security incidents, reducing the number of operational incidents that will be reported, and improving the meaningfulness of the incident reports received. The revision of the Guidelines also intends to decrease the reporting burden on payment service providers (PSPs). The consultation runs until 14 December 2020.

The European Banking Authority (EBA) published today its final draft Regulatory Technical Standards (RTS) specifying the prudential treatment of software assets. As the banking sector is moving towards a more digital environment, the aim of these draft RTS is to replace the current upfront full deduction prudential regime so as to strike an appropriate balance between the need to maintain sufficient conservatism in the prudential treatment of software assets and their relevance from a business and an economic perspective. The final draft RTS keep a simple approach based on a prudential amortisation of software assets calibrated over a period of maximum three years.

The European Banking Authority (EBA) responded last week to the EU Commission’s consultation on the proposed new consumer agenda where it called for harmonisation of the creditworthiness assessment process for consumer lending across the EU. The EBA response focuses on the revision of the Consumer Credit Directive (CCD) and builds on the recent EBA Guidelines on loan origination and monitoring.

The Joint Board of Appeal of the European Supervisory Authorities (ESAs – European Banking Authority, European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority, and European Securities and Markets Authority) published today its decision in the appeal case brought by Mr Howerton against the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA). The Board of Appeal’s decision considered as inadmissable the Appellant’s claim that six national financial supervisory authorities and ESMA should have taken supervisory steps in relation to an alleged non-application of Union law.

The European Banking Authority (EBA) published today its quarterly Risk Dashboard covering Q2 2020 data and summarising the main risks and vulnerabilities in the EU banking sector. Whereas capital ratios held up well, there are indications that the crisis starts to have an impact on asset quality. With increasing cost of risk, profitability continued its declining trend.

Following the entry into force of the fifth Capital Requirements Directive (CRD V), the European Banking Authority (EBA) published today a set of Guidelines on the appropriate subsets of sectoral exposures to which a competent or designated authority (hereby relevant authority) may apply a systemic risk buffer.

The European Banking Authority (EBA) published today its annual work programme for 2021, describing the activities and tasks of the Authority for the coming year and highlighting its key strategic areas of work.

The European Banking Authority (EBA) launched today its 7th annual EU-wide transparency exercise, with the objective of providing market participants with updated information on the financial conditions of EU banks as of June 2020, thus assessing the preliminary impact of the COVID-19 crisis on the sector. The EBA expects to publish the results of this exercise at the beginning of December, along with the Risk Assessment Report.