Press releases

The European Banking Authority (EBA) published today its Guidelines on loan origination and monitoring that expect institutions to develop robust and prudent standards to ensure newly originated loans are assessed properly. The Guidelines also aim to ensure that the institutions’ practices are aligned with consumer protection rules and respect fair treatment of consumers.

The European Banking Authority (EBA) published today an Opinion following the notification by the French macroprudential authority, the Haut Conseil de Stabilité Financière (HCSF), of its intention to extend a measure introduced in 2018 on the use of Article 458(9) of the Capital Requirements Regulation (CRR) to safeguard institutions from excessive risk-taking and to prevent the build-up of future vulnerabilities. The measure intends to tighten, for French global or other systemically important institutions, the large-exposure limits applicable to large and highly indebted non-financial corporations (NFCs) resident in France or groups of connected NFCs assessed to be highly indebted and based in France. Based on the evidence submitted, the EBA does not object to the extension of the proposed measure, which will be applied from 1 July 2020 to 30 June 2021.

The European Banking Authority (EBA) published today a preliminary assessment of the impact of COVID-19 on the EU banking sector. With the global economy facing unprecedented challenges, banks entered the health crisis with strong capital and liquidity buffers and managed the pressure on operational capacities activating their contingency plans. The crisis is expected to affect asset quality and, thus, profitability of banks going forward. Nonetheless, the capital accumulated by banks during the past years along with the capital relief provided by regulators amounts on average to 5p.p. above their overall capital requirements (OCR). This capital buffer should allow banks to withstand the potential credit risk losses derived from a sensitivity analysis based on the 2018 stress test.

The European Banking Authority (EBA) publishes today a Report, which assesses interlinkages between recovery and resolution planning under the Bank Recovery and Resolution Directive (BRRD), with the aim of enhancing synergies between the two phases and ensuring consistency in their potential implementation.

The Advisory Committee on Proportionality (ACP) of the European Banking Authority (EBA) held today its first meeting chaired by Helmut Ettl, Executive Director of the Austrian Financial Market Authority and Member of the EBA Board of Supervisors (BoS), and Mario Quagliariello, EBA Director of Economic Analysis and Statistics. The focus of this Committee is to advise the EBA on how its actions and measures should take account of specific differences prevailing in the banking sector related to the nature, scale and complexity of risks, to business models and practice as well as to the size of financial institutions.

The European Banking Authority (EBA) launched today a public consultation on its draft Regulatory Technical Standards (RTS) for contractual recognition of stay powers laid down in the Bank Recovery and Resolution Directive (BRRD). These RTS support the effective application of temporary restrictions on early termination rights (resolution stays) in relation to financial contracts governed by the law of a third country. These standards are the first EBA mandate stemming from the revised BRRD and aim at promoting the effective application of recovery and resolution powers to banks and banking groups and to foster convergence of practices between relevant authorities and institutions across the EU. The consultation runs until 15 August 2020.

The European Banking Authority (EBA) published today 2019 data relating to two key concepts in the Deposit Guarantee Schemes Directive (DGSD): available financial means, and covered deposits. The EBA publishes this data on a yearly basis to enhance the transparency and public accountability of deposit guarantee schemes (DGSs) across the EU to the benefit of depositors, markets, policymakers, DGSs and Members States.

The European Banking Authority (EBA) published today the results of its inquiry into dividend arbitrage schemes, which looked into the actions of prudential and anti-money laundering (AML) and countering the financing of terrorism (CFT) supervisors in dealing with such schemes. The resulting Report sets out the EBA’s expectations of credit institutions and national authorities under the current regulatory framework. The EBA also decided on a 10-point action plan for 2020/21 to enhance the future framework of prudential and anti-money laundering requirements covering such schemes.

The European Banking Authority (EBA) launched an updated version of its online collaboration platform enabling the joint work and sharing of information between authorities involved in supervision and resolution of cross-border banking groups. Thanks to its enhanced functionalities, the updated college platform facilitates the operation of the colleges and ensures high security standards.

The European Banking Authority (EBA) welcomed today the EU Commission’s action plan on anti-money laundering and counter terrorist financing (AML/CFT), and stands ready to support the Commission’s considerations through the consultation, whilst continuing to fulfil its recently strengthened mandate to prevent ML/TF and use new powers to lead, coordinate and monitor the EU financial sector’s fight against ML/TF.

The European Banking Authority (EBA) published today its proposals for developing a simple, transparent and standardised (STS) framework for synthetic securitisation. This proposal, which is limited to balance-sheet securitisation, includes a list of criteria to be considered when labelling the synthetic securitisation as ‘STS' and provides the pros and cons of a potential differentiated capital treatment for this type of securitisation.

The European Banking Authority (EBA) published today its final Guidelines on credit risk mitigation (CRM) in the context of the advanced internal ratings-based (A-IRB) approach. These Guidelines, which are part of the EBA's regulatory review of the IRB approach, aim to eliminate the remaining significant differences in approaches in the area of CRM, which are due to either different supervisory practices or bank-specific choices. These Guidelines complement the EBA Report on CRM, which focuses on the standardised approach (SA) and the foundation-IRB approach (F-IRB).

The European Banking Authority (EBA) launched today an additional EU-wide transparency exercise to provide market participants with updated information on the financial conditions of EU banks as of 31 December 2019, prior to the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. The EBA expects to publish the results of this exercise at the beginning of June.

The European Banking Authority (EBA) published today an update to its Implementing Technical Standards (ITS) on benchmarking of internal approaches. The updated ITS include all benchmarking portfolios that will be used for the 2021 exercise. The main novelty is the inclusion of the IFRS9 template. The benchmarking exercise is an essential supervisory tool to enhance the quality of internal models, which is particularly important in a stressed economic situation.