In the wake of the 2007–09 global financial crisis, the Committee on the Global Financial System (CGFS), which oversees the collection of the BIS international banking statistics (IBS), approved a major set of enhancements to the IBS aimed at filling long-standing data gaps and better capturing the new financial landscape. Notwithstanding the ambition of these enhancements, they left unaddressed some gaps in the available data. The BIS was tasked with forming a study group to explore options for further enhancing the IBS.
This report summarises the discussions and recommendations of the Study Group. The recommendations focus on clarifying the reporting guidelines and supplementing the existing statistics with data that are readily available. The Study Group considered several major changes: for example, expanding the consolidated banking statistics (CBS) on an immediate counterparty basis while discontinuing the CBS on an ultimate risk basis. However, the Group concluded that the costs of implementing major changes outweighed their analytical benefits.