Press releases

The European Banking Authority (EBA) published today its peer review on the prudential assessment of qualifying holdings, aiming at assessing competent authorities’ application of the Joint ESAs Guidelines on the prudential assessment of the acquisition of qualifying holdings. Overall, competent authorities have largely or fully applied the ESAs Guidelines, which have thus significantly contributed to the convergence of assessment practices of proposed acquisition or increase of qualifying holdings across the EU.

​​​​​​​The European Banking Authority (EBA) published today 12 indicators and updated the underlying data from the 31 largest institutions in the EU. This end-2020 data serves as input for the internationally agreed standards on which a smaller subset of banks will be identified as global systemically important institutions (G-SIIs), following the final decision from the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS) and the Financial Stability Board (FSB). The EBA, acting as a central data hub in the disclosure process, updates this data on a yearly basis and provides a user-friendly platform to aggregate it across the EU.

​​​​​​​The European Banking Authority (EBA) published today its Report on high earners for 2019. The analysis shows that in 2019, 4 963 individuals working for EU banks received a remuneration of more than EUR 1 million, which is mostly the same as in 2018. The average ratio between the variable and fixed remuneration for high earners decreased from 139% in 2018 to 129% in 2019. Institutions’ preparation for the UK withdrawal from the EU has affected the distribution of high earners across the EU with a number of high earners relocating from the UK to the EU.

The European Banking Authority (EBA) published today its Annual Report on resolution colleges for 2020. The Report sets out the EBA’s observations on the functioning of colleges during the year and the progress achieved in key areas of resolution planning. The Report reflects on the effects of moving to a virtual format of discussion on foot of the pandemic, and notes that the enforced change was broadly successful and reflected well on contingency planning measures. However, it also highlights areas for improvement to ensure that information exchange and coordination between members remains robust.

The European Banking Authority (EBA) published today an updated tool, which specifies the mapping between quantitative disclosure data points and the relevant supervisory reporting data points. This tool aims at facilitating institutions’ compliance with disclosure requirements and improving the consistency and quality of the information disclosed.

The European Banking Authority (EBA) published today draft implementing technical standards (ITS) amending the ITS on provision of information for the purpose of resolution plans (Implementing Regulation (EU) 2018/1624). The amendments are minimal and aim at re-aligning the standards with the provisions of the Bank Recovery and Resolution Directive (BRRD), following the changes to the minimum requirement for own funds and eligible liabilities (MREL) introduced in the revised BRRD2, as well as to remove some identified obstacles, at the technical level, that hamper compliance with the requirements specified in these ITS. The amended ITS are envisaged to apply for the first time with the reference date of 31 December 2021.

The European Banking Authority (EBA) launched today a public consultation on new Guidelines on the role, tasks and responsibilities of anti-money laundering and countering the financing of terrorism (AML/CFT) compliance officers. The Guidelines also include provisions on the wider AML/CFT governance set-up, including at the level of the group. Once adopted, these Guidelines will apply to all financial sector operators that are within the scope of the AML Directive. This consultation runs until 2 November 2021.

The European Banking Authority (EBA) published today the results of its 2021 EU-wide stress test, which involved 50 banks from 15 EU and EEA countries, covering 70% of the EU banking sector assets. This exercise allows to assess, in a consistent way, the resilience of EU banks over a three-year horizon under both a baseline and an adverse scenario, which is characterised by severe shocks taking into account the impact of the pandemic. The individual bank results promote market discipline and are an input into the supervisory decision-making process. The adverse scenario has an impact of 485 bps on banks’ CET1 fully loaded capital ratio (497 bps on a transitional basis), leading to a 10.2% CET1 capital ratio at the end of 2023 (10.3% on a transitional basis).

​​​​​​​The European Banking Authority (EBA) published today clarifications to a sixth set of issues that had been raised by participants of its Working Group (WG) on Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) under the Payment Services Directive (PSD2). The clarifications respond to issues raised on authentication with electronic signatures, biometrics and authentication on mobile apps, preventing social engineering fraud, ability of payment initiation service providers to refuse a payer’s request to initiate a payment transaction, and complexity in the authentication process.

The European Banking Authority (EBA) published today its final Guidelines on the monitoring of the threshold and other procedural aspects on the establishment of intermediate EU parent undertakings (IPU) as laid down in the Capital Requirements Directive (CRD). The Guidelines specify how third country groups should calculate and monitor the total value of their assets in the Union in order to ensure timely application of the IPU requirement.

The European Banking Authority (EBA) launched today a public consultation on draft regulatory technical standards (RTS) setting out criteria for the identification of shadow banking entities for the purposes of reporting large exposures. The consultation runs until 26 October 2021.

The European Banking Authority (EBA) publishes today a Discussion Paper aiming at gathering some preliminary input on how to standardise the proportionality assessment methodology for credit institutions and investment firms. The discussion paper invites all market participants affected by the proportional treatment in the application of EBA regulatory products to provide their input. The consultation runs until 22 October 2021.

The European Banking Authority (EBA) published today its annual report on Asset Encumbrance. As COVID-19 spread across Europe, banks made extensive use of central bank facilities to strengthen their liquidity buffers and maintain the flow of credit to the real economy. This resulted in the largest yearly rise in the asset encumbrance ratio since data is available.

The European Banking Authority (EBA) published today a methodological guide to mystery shopping (MS). This guide has been developed based on the findings and good practices identified in the EBA report on MS activities of NCAs published earlier this year and aims to support NCAs in the design and implementation of MS activities.

The European Banking Authority (EBA) launched today a public consultation on amendments to its Implementing Technical Standards (ITS) on currencies with constraints on the availability of liquid assets in the context of the liquidity coverage ratio (LCR). The proposed amendments remove the Norwegian Krone (NOK) from the list, with the result that no currency will be recognised as having constraints on the availability of liquid assets. The consultation runs until 16 October 2021.