The EBA provides guidance on the benchmarking of diversity practices under the Capital Requirements and Investment Firms Directives

The European Banking Authority (EBA) today published the final Guidelines on the benchmarking of diversity practices, including diversity policies and gender pay gap, under the Capital Requirements Directive (CRD) and the Investment Firms Directive (IFD). These Guidelines will ensure a higher level of transparency on the EBA’s work on the topic of diversity and gender equality and will help improve the quality of the collected data as well as the awareness of all stakeholders in this area.

The Guidelines apply to institutions and investment firms that should be able to provide data on the diversity of their management body and the gender-pay-gap if such data is requested. Under the Guidelines the data will be collected only from a representative sample of institutions and investment firms regarding their diversity policies, diversity practices and the gender pay-gap at the level of the management body every three years.

The EBA Board of Supervisors has adopted a decision on the technical aspects that will be considered for the sampling of institutions.

Legal basis and next steps

Under Article 91(11) of the CRD, the EBA and competent authorities are required to benchmark diversity practices in institutions’ management bodies. The same applies to investment firms as specified in Article 9(1) of the Directive on Markets in Financial Instruments (MiFID). The EBA and the competent authorities are also mandated to collect information on the gender pay gap of members of the management body under Article 75(1) of the CRD and 34(1) of the IFD.

The new reporting format will apply for the collection of data in 2025 for the reporting date 31 December 2024.