Towards the banking union, oopportunities and challenges for statistics : seventh European Central Bank statistics conference, 15 October 2014 : May 2015

In October 2014 the ECB hosted its seventh biennial conference on statistics, entitled "Towards the banking union: opportunities and challenges for statistics". The conference attracted a wide range of policy-makers, including a number of members of the ECB's Governing Council, as well as users and compilers of statistics from central banks, supervisory authorities, statistical institutes, international institutions, academia, the media and the financial industry. The conference preceded by less than three weeks the start of the Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM) on 4 November 2014, when the ECB became responsible for banking supervision in the euro area. Hence, the timing of the conference was perfect to discuss the opportunities that this new task will offer to statistics departments in the national central banks (NCBs) and the ECB, as well as the challenges that it will bring. It is a tradition of the conference to have three sessions focusing on producing and using statistics and one session on communicating statistics. The topics discussed concerned (i) the data needs of the SSM; (ii) statistics for multipurpose use, and synergies between central banking and supervisory functions; (iii) the micro and macro dimensions of the banking union and the challenges for statistics; and (iv) communicating statistics to meet user requirements and manage market expectations