09 November 2012

Improving the BIS international banking statistics

A report released by the Committee on the Global Financial System (CGFS) documents a series of enhancements which are designed to make significant and long-lasting improvements to the international banking statistics (IBS) collected by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS).

In particular, the enhancements will provide a more comprehensive picture of national banking systems' global consolidated balance sheets, allow for a more detailed analysis of vis-à-vis country information, and help to track banks' funding patterns and associated risks better. They will also make national contributions to the IBS more complete and accessible.

The report provides a short introduction to the IBS and their main uses, and discusses the nature and rationale of the forthcoming changes, which have been developed by a group of statistical experts and economists chaired by Werner Hermann of the Swiss National Bank.

In early 2010, triggered by the most recent crisis experience, the CGFS mandated the Ad-hoc Group on Statistics, chaired by Werner Hermann (Swiss National Bank), to investigate various options for improving the IBS. The Group analysed a range of proposals from a conceptual and practical perspective. In addition, it surveyed the private sector on the additional reporting burden, and considered ways to reduce these costs without materially compromising the analytical value of the data being collected.

The Group followed a two-stage approach. The first stage focused on enhancements to the IBS that improve the ability to monitor global financial stability without requiring central banks to collect additional data from their reporting financial institutions (although they will involve significant changes to reporting systems at central banks as well as at the BIS). These enhancements will provide a more comprehensive picture of national banking systems’ global consolidated balance sheets and allow for a more detailed analysis of vis-à-vis country information. The CGFS approved the Stage 1 enhancements in April 2011. The first data will refer to Q2 2012.

Work at the second stage sought to expand IBS data coverage to improve, in particular: (i) the understanding of banks’ credit exposures to particular countries and counterparty sectors, (ii) the monitoring of trends in the supply of bank credit (both cross-border and domestically sourced) to the financial and non-financial sectors of individual countries, and (iii) assessments of banks’ funding risks, including currency (and, to a lesser extent, maturity) mismatches in the assets and liabilities of major banking systems. In addition, reporting central banks decided to make efforts to advance the completeness and accessibility of their existing national data contributions. The CGFS approved the Stage 2 enhancements in January 2012. Stage 2 is scheduled to begin with the reporting of data for Q4 2013.

The two sets of enhancements are designed to make significant and long-lasting improvements to the IBS. To minimise the burden for reporting institutions, they tie in with other international data initiatives, particularly the work led by the Financial Stability Board (FSB) secretariat and International Monetary Fund (IMF) staff on closing data gaps, which includes the development of a bank-level dataset for systemically important global banks (see FSB-IMF (2009, 2010, and 2011).

This report documents these forthcoming enhancements of the IBS based on the work of the Ad-hoc Group. Section 2 provides a short, high-level introduction to the IBS, as they are currently reported, and their main uses. Section 3 describes the key features of the recently adopted Stage 1 and Stage 2 IBS enhancements and assesses the new data’s analytical value. Section 4 ends by outlining possible future work on IBS enhancements.

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