The ECB has decided to keep capital requirements largely unchanged for 2025 due to the strong performance of banks. However, specific banks will face additional capital requirements due to insufficient provisioning for non-performing loans and high exposures to leveraged loans. The ECB emphasized the need for banks to address governance, risk management, and operational resilience, particularly in light of macroeconomic threats and digital transformation challenges.
The ECB's 2024-2026 priorities for banks include enhancing resilience against economic and geopolitical shocks, improving governance, and advancing digital transformation. Key focuses are on credit risk management, internal governance, and cybersecurity to ensure stability amid rising uncertainties.
"Under the Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM) introduced in 2014, the European Central Bank directly supervises significant euro area banks, which hold about 82% of total banking assets. We find that this important supervisory change has positive effects on the return on assets and the return on risk-weighted assets of SSM banks without increasing the risk weights used to calculate regulatory capital."
"... requirement releases are more effective for banks with a low capital headroom over requirements and do not trigger additional risk-taking. These findings provide key insights on how to design effective bank capital requirement releases in crisis time."
"Drawing on recently disclosed information on the Pillar 2 capital requirements of banks directly supervised by the ECB, we find that bank-specific capital requirements are mostly driven by business model and profitability, credit risk, and internal governance and risk management issues. Moreover, we propose a novel measure of bank governance quality that teases out the qualitative dimension of the P2R decision."
"Our results confirm that the publication of capital requirements can have a disciplinary effect since banks publishing their requirements tend to have more robust capital ratios, which improves market discipline and financial stability."
"This paper presents an overview of key proposals formulated by the European Systemic Risk Board (ESRB), the European Banking Authority (EBA) and the European Central Bank (ECB) in the context of the review of the macroprudential policy framework of the European Union (EU), aimed at improving its operation and efficiency over the medium term."
"In addition to raising capital requirements, it introduced three ratios, two of which set out minimum standards for liquidity and funding risk, i.e. the liquidity coverage ratio and the net stable funding ratio, and one which aims to limit leverage in the banking system, i.e. the leverage ratio... This paper investigates the extent to which the regulatory initiatives might have already had an impact on banks."