From source data to reporting: an Austrian approach

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Data reporting and user requirements have become increasingly granular and demanding, which also applies to central bank and banking supervision statistics. Traditionally, every authority has devised its own approach to collecting data and defining requirements, and every reporting agent implemented these requirements separately. This isolated approach frequently resulted in redundant and non-harmonised data collection schemes and inconsistent implementation by different banks, making reporting processes inefficient and data analysis complicated.

Austrian banks and the Austrian National Bank (OeNB) decided to develop and implement new approaches to data reporting in order to address this unsatisfactory reporting situation and to minimise the risk of exploding costs.

This paper starts with a description of the important initial phase of the Austrian paradigm change in banks’ reporting. The main features of this new reporting approach are:

1. collaboration between the OeNB and banks, and among banks
2. the realisation of synergies between banks using a shared reporting platform
3. the reporting data model developed jointly by banks and the OeNB.

The involved OeNB experts have been invited to speak at numerous international conferences and bilateral meetings, as well as to hold important positions in comparable projects of the European System of Central Banks, bearing witness to the OeNB’s leading role in modernising reporting.