Government & open data
ECB & ECB-bankentoezicht
The European Central Bank publishes two kinds of material that are easily conflated in legal work. On the monetary side: policy decisions, the Economic Bulletin, the Financial Stability Review, the annual report, the monetary policy accounts and a large series of working papers, occasional papers and legal working papers. On the supervisory side, ECB Banking Supervision publishes the SREP methodology and aggregate outcomes, supervisory guides, letters to banks, thematic reports and published sanctions. The ECB is central bank, supervisor and research institute at once, and a document's status depends on which role it was written in.
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What this source does not give you
Almost nothing on this site is legislation. Of its supervisory guides the ECB states: 'Supervisory guides do not establish binding obligations; these are solely created by the legislator', and 'the supervisory expectations included in ECB guides are also not binding'. Research publications carry the disclaimer that the views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the ECB.
Legal domains for which LEO consults this source
Dutch legal domains; each link opens the domain page on leo.prudai.com.
Frequently asked questions
- Is an ECB guide binding on a bank?
- No. The ECB describes its supervisory guides as non-binding statements that help banks apply the regulatory framework. The expectations in them are explicitly a starting point for dialogue with the bank, case by case and subject to proportionality, and they do not rule out a different approach in a specific case. A guide brings the applicable rules and the ECB's way of applying them together in one document; the obligation itself comes from the legislation the guide refers to.
- What is the difference between a guide, a supervisory letter, a methodology and a report?
- The ECB distinguishes between them itself. A guide sets out criteria, processes and supervisory expectations: forward-looking and non-binding. A supervisory letter is addressed to bank management and conveys non-binding guidance or expectations on a limited issue, often quickly after an emerging risk. A public methodology explains how the ECB produces its assessments, data or analyses, for instance the SREP methodology, and deliberately contains no supervisory expectations. A supervisory report describes observed practice or the outcome of a targeted review and adds no new expectations.
- Which banks are under direct ECB supervision?
- The ECB directly supervises significant institutions in the participating member states; less significant institutions are supervised by the national supervisor, with the ECB overseeing the consistency of that supervision. Which institutions count as significant follows from published criteria, and the ECB maintains a list of supervised banks. For less significant institutions it publishes a separate supervisory approach, a dedicated SREP and an annual report.
- Can I cite an ECB working paper as the ECB's position?
- No. The working papers, discussion papers, occasional papers, legal working papers and statistics papers carry the standard notice that the views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the ECB. That is not a formality: those series exist precisely to publish research that is not yet the institutional position. For the ECB's position, look to policy decisions, the Economic Bulletin, the annual report and the formal publications.
- What does the ECB publish about enforcement and sanctions?
- ECB Banking Supervision has a dedicated section for imposed sanctions and related statistics, alongside enforcement measures, authorisations, fit and proper assessments, stress tests, recovery plans and internal model investigations. SREP outcomes are published in aggregate, together with the methodology used. Individual supervisory decisions are addressed to the institution concerned; what becomes public appears in those sections, not in a complete register of decisions.