The European Banking Authority its 2024 EU-wide transparency exercise on Monday 9 September 2024. This annual initiative is set to provide preliminary insights into the health and resilience of the European banking sector ahead of the EBA’s 2025 stress tests. The final results of the exercise are scheduled for release at the end of November 2024, alongside the publication of the EBA’s risk assessment report.

The EBA confirmed that over 100 major EU banks are participating in this year's exercise. According to the EBA’s official statement, the transparency exercise will, as in previous years, rely solely on supervisory reporting data. It will cover a broad range of critical indicators, including capital positions, profitability, financial assets, risk exposure amounts, sovereign exposures and asset quality.

A spokesperson for the EBA told Delano that two banks from Luxembourg were among the institutions involved but declined to name them. In the previous edition, Banque Internationale à Luxembourg (Bil), Spuerkeess and Quintet Private Bank in the transparency exercise.

The EU-wide transparency exercise, first introduced in 2011, has since evolved into a key element of the supervision of the EU banking sector. By offering detailed insights into the capital strength, risk exposures and asset quality of European banks, the exercise plays a significant role in bolstering confidence in the resilience and stability of the EU financial system.

In 2019, the EBA broadened the scope of the exercise by increasing the frequency of disclosures to a quarterly basis. This change significantly boosted the amount of publicly available data, thereby offering a clearer and more up-to-date picture of the European banking sector’s condition.