On 20 August, the European Banking Authority (EBA) updated data relating to the 37 largest institutions in the EU whose leverage ratios exceed EUR 200 billion. This in turn will be used to identify a smaller group of banks which are considered to be global systemically important institutions (G-SIIs). This is the first year that the EBA has included the Legal Entity Identifier (LEI) of each institution included, to facilitate wider data analysis and peer review.

Excluding outliers in the updated data set, the EBA’s stable sample of 33 EU institutions indicated that the aggregate amount of exposures within the EU totalled EUR 25.6 trillion, and during the 2019 year this rose by the fastest pace in 5 years. Aggregate values for underwriting exposures saw the most significant increase of 11.6%, followed by aggregate values for trading and available-for-sale-securities (7.6%). A slight decline was observed in the outstanding amount for level 3 assets (1%), which marginally offsets the increase reported during the 2018 period.

The EBA plans to continue to update this data on an annually basis and, in its capacity as a centralised hub, will implement a user-friendly platform to facilitate aggregation of this data across the EU.