Call for proportionality in ECB’s revisions to options and discretions policies

The ECB is proposing revisions to its policies primarily to account for legislative changes adopted since they were first published in 2016. Most of the revisions pertain to options and discretions in the application of liquidity requirements. The consultation relates to many aspects of supervision, including permissions for banks seeking to reduce their capital, the treatment of certain exposures in the calculation of the leverage ratio as well as some exemptions from the large exposures limit.

Call for proportionality

In the area of consolidation, ESBG considers that the ECB’s requirement for the application to use a consolidation method other than the equity method is disproportionate. Institutions would have to regularly determine the equivalence method (which they would rather avoid) in order to provide the evidence as required by the ECB. Institutions that have already received exemption approval for the old portfolio as of the reporting date of 31 December 2020 will hardly be able to prove the disproportionate effort of applying the equivalence method in the application for newly acquired participations that are immaterial in terms of amount. Hence, the ECB requirement should be deleted or limited to cases where the sum of the relevant book values reaches a size that is relevant for the banking group.

Also in the area of consolidation, under commercial law (National Generally Accepted Accounting Principles – nGAAP), insignificant participations are generally exempted from the consolidation requirement. In the case of larger institutions, these exemptions soon exceed the EUR 10 million mark, up to which non-inclusion would be allowed even without a case-by-case decision. However, the ECB requirements makes it necessary to apply for individual case decisions for a large number of participations with very low book values in each case. In this respect, we believe that the ECB should not generally classify the case-by-case decision under Article 19(2) CRR as an exceptional case, but should consider it as a regular process.

Regarding liquidity waivers, ESBG believes that when one is granted the respective liquidity reporting requirements should also be waived. The systematic denial of waiving individual liquidity reporting requirements would contradict the objective of the waiver itself and would continue to be a reporting burden for European banks.

In addition, we ask the SSM to allow the utilisation of the effective maturity for internal rating-based foundation (IRB-F). Considering the coming changes regarding the use of internal models, we in fact expect the IRB-F portfolio to expand, particularly for short-term intra-bank exposure. Finally, a narrow definition of cash clearing operations via the ECB Guidelines should be rejected