Press releases

​​​​​​​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. 

The three European Supervisory Authorities (EBA, EIOPA and ESMA - ESAs) have issued their first joint risk assessment Report of the financial sector since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. The Report highlights how the pandemic has led to further amplified profitability concerns across the board and heightened liquidity challenges in segments of the investment fund sector. It particularly points to economic and market uncertainty as a key challenge going forward.

The European Banking Authority (EBA) has been closely monitoring the developments of the COVID-19 pandemic and, considering the progress made so far, will phase out its Guidelines on legislative and non-legislative payment moratoria in accordance with its end of September deadline. These Guidelines, which were published in the early phases of the COVID-19 pandemic, have provided the necessary flexibility as well as certainty on the regulatory framework, in light of significant number of actions taken by banks to support their customers as exceptional lock-down measures were put in place. The continued ability for banks to provide lending is of key importance and the EBA will keep monitoring the situation as needed.

The European Banking Authority (EBA) published today an Opinion addressed to the European Commission to raise awareness as to the opportunity to clarify certain issues relating to the definition of credit institution in the upcoming review of the Capital Requirements Regulation (CRR) and Capital Requirements Directive (CRD). Such clarifications would be beneficial to the development of a truly uniform Single Rulebook and ultimately to a deeper market integration of banking and financial services across the EU.

The European Supervisory Authorities (EBA, EIOPA and ESMA - ESAs) published today a survey seeking public feedback on presentational aspects of product templates, pursuant to Article 8(3), Article 9(5) and Article 11(4) of Regulation (EU) 2019/2088 on sustainability‐related disclosures in the financial services (SFDR). The survey is open for comments until 16 October 2020.

The European Banking Authority (EBA) published today an online survey to receive input from credit institutions on their practices and views in the area of disclosure of information on environmental social governance (ESG) risks. The survey, which is addressed to large credit institutions that will be required to disclose prudential information on ESG risks, aims to support the EBA’s policy work on Pillar 3 disclosure and its wider efforts to develop a robust policy framework in the area of sustainable finance. The deadline for the call for input is 16 October 2020.