BANKING: EBA releases templates for stress test

The European Banking Authority (EBA) has published the final templates for the 2014 EU-wide stress test that will be conducted on 128 Eurozone banks and will be announced in October.
In a statement on its website, EBA said it will be publishing “up to 12,000 data points per bank across the entire EU” that will cover banks’ composition of capital, risk weighted assets (RWAs), profit and loss (P&L), exposures to sovereigns, credit risk and securitisation.
The EBA notes that “by disclosing data in a consistent and comparable way across the Single Market, the EBA will bring greater transparency to EU banks, contributing to enhanced market discipline of the entire EU banking sector”.
In addition, for the first time, the EBA will disclose a so-called fully loaded common equity tier one capital ratio for each bank. The disclosure will be based on the outcome of the stress test from end 2013 to end 2016.
In Cyprus, the banks that will undergo will be the Bank of Cyprus, Hellenic Bank and the Cooperative sector, which was bailed out by a 1.5 bln euro government rescue. It is not clear if the Russian VTB-owned RCB Bank will be the fourth bank on the island to be subject to the stress tests.