ECB, EBA work towards more integrated reporting
The Eurofiling conference reconvened at the ECB’s HQ this week, with proceedings kicked off by Ms Silke Stapel-Weber, the Director General for Statistics at the European Central Bank. Ms Stapel-Weber announced that the next step of the Integrated Reporting Framework (IReF) has been approved by the ECB’s governing council. IReF is the ECB’s long term strategic effort to unify statistical and prudential data collection, as well as to re-evaluate its approach to the granularity of certain data. IReF also aims to unify reporting within a consistent data model. She also announced that the ECB now considers the EBA/EIOPA developed DPM 2.0 modelling framework a “valid candidate” for IReF modelling, once enhanced governance mechanisms have been developed and agreed.
The ECB is just one of many central banks that are looking to leverage the collection of more granular data (typically end of day balances and certain transactional ledgers) from banks, combined with a range of accompanying metadata that might permit regulators to carry out their own aggregations and analysis using this “rawer” information.
She made clear that while the use of more granular data for some transactions seems quite likely, there is a host of information that will be required from reporting entities in a similar form to today, requiring a range of accounting and management judgement to be applied to it before it can be meaningfully used.
She also emphasised the value that the ECB believes that reporting banks can derive from BIRD – the voluntary and collaborative Banks’ Integrated Reporting Dictionary — an open data model that banks can leverage in the implementation of their own internal management systems in such a way as to ensure tight integration with relevant statistical reporting requirements. BIRD remains an entirely voluntary effort. Finally she underlined the importance of timeliness in reporting and even speculated about experimentation with a range of alternative approaches to the acquisition of urgent data during a crisis.
Since the DPM 2.0 framework will require the submission of data to the ECB and EBA as xBRL-CSV formatted reports, there is certainly the potential for these related projects to drive a considerable expansion in the use of XBRL by these authorities. It needs to be emphasised that there is extensive work and considerable collaboration required in the months and years ahead!
