Some data about the financial industry is included in the sources listed in chapter 10, along with other data about the service sector. The data sets gathered about other service industries are not, however, necessarily the best types of data for understanding the conditions and activities of banks and other financial institutions. The sources in this chapter attempt to fill that gap by focusing only on the financial industry. For the United States, the sources in this chapter primarily provide microdata specifically on individual banks or individual loans. This sort of bank-level microdata is not easily available across countries; instead, the “Major Sources: World” section of this chapter provides sources for aggregate data about the banking industry and about the services it provides. The “Minor Sources” section lists a few other countries for which bank microdata is available. Note that sources for aggregate, economy-wide lending data for the United States are not included in this chapter, since that data is available through FRED (see chapter 8).
Responsibility for overseeing financial institutions is dispersed across several federal agencies, in addition to the fifty states. As a result, data about financial institutions—banks, credit unions, mortgage lenders, and the like—is equally dispersed.
Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council
The largest single concentration of this data is disseminated by the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC, www.ffiec.gov), an interagency council that brings together all of the federal agencies with an oversight interest in financial institutions: the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), the National Credit Union Administration (NCUA), the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). The FFIEC Central Data Repository’s Public Data Distribution site (https://cdr.ffiec.gov/public/) makes available data on individual commercial and savings banks (but not credit unions or investment banks), in-cluding data on various types of income, expenses, assets, and liabilities; amounts of deposits held in various categories; amounts of loans made in various categories; and amounts of loans that have been charged off. The data is available in two ways: users can search for and download human-readable information on individual banks, or they can download large data sets with all of the information for every bank for a given time period.1
The FFIEC also distributes data generated from the reports submitted by lenders to comply with the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (www.ffiec.gov/hmda/hmdaproducts.htm). Data is available at the level of individual loans from 2009 to present, with a lag of about two years; aggregate data at the lender, metropolitan statistical area (MSA), and national level are available from 1999 to present, again with a lag of about two years. For each loan or loan application, the data reports amount of the loan; race, ethnicity, gender, and income of the borrower; location of the property (metropolitan statistical area, state, county, and Census tract); if the loan was denied, the reason for the denial; and additional information about the type of loan and type of property. The aggregate data is also available broken down by many of these parameters.
National Credit Union Administration
The FFIEC does not distribute data about credit unions; that data is handled by the NCUA, the agency that oversees credit unions (www.ncua.gov/DataApps/Pages/default.aspx). The data disseminated by the NCUA for credit unions is similar to the data disseminated by the FFIEC for banks: information about amounts of loans, investments, and other assets held by the credit unions; credit unions’ income and expenses in various categories; amounts of delinquent and charged-off loans; and so on. Additional data is available on other topics, including number of current members and number of potential members. Data is available from 1994 to present. As with the bank data, users can search for data on individual credit unions, or they can download files with data on all credit unions for a given quarter.
Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (U.S. Department of the Treasury)
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) oversees national banks (those chartered by the federal government, as opposed to the typically smaller banks chartered by state governments). Nevertheless, much of the data on national banks is actually reported on the FFIEC’s Central Data Repository Public Data Distribution site. One data series that is disseminated via the OCC site is data from the Survey of Credit Underwriting Practices (access via www.occ.gov/publications/), an annual survey in which the lending practices of large national banks are examined for changes in underwriting standards and credit risks. Data is available online from 1998 to present.
Major Sources: World
There is little comprehensive, global information on banks and banking. Some useful and interesting data on the bank industry and aggregate lending is available, although it is primarily for developed and upper-middle-income countries.
Financial Access Survey (International Monetary Fund)
One truly global source for international banking data is the Financial Access Survey, which is carried out by the International Monetary Fund (IMF, http://fas.imf.org). This survey looks specifically at banking from the perspectives of households and small and medium-sized businesses. Questions address physical access to banking services (e.g., number of bank branches in the country’s three largest cities, number of ATMs per 1,000 square kilometers), actual penetration of banking services (e.g., number of adults per 1,000 who have bank accounts or bank loans, percentage of GDP deposited in banks or other types of financial institutions), and availability of banking services to small and medium-sized businesses (e.g., percentage of bank accounts and bank loans held by small and medium-sized businesses). Data is available from 2004 to present for almost all countries, but there are significant gaps in the coverage for some variables.
Bank for International Settlements
The Bank for International Settlements (BIS, www.bis.org/statistics/index.htm) and its Committee on Payment and Settlement Systems (CPSS) publish statistics on many topics related to international finance, covering its approximately forty member countries. These members include many developed countries (e.g., United States, Germany, Japan), some developing countries (e.g., India, Mexico, Turkey), and some small territories that nevertheless are important in international banking (e.g., Cayman Islands, Hong Kong). The data covers topics related to international finance itself—for example, international lending by banks—and comparative data about the financial systems of countries who are members of the BIS or CPSS, such as per-capita annual usage of checks and debit cards.
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
Another source primarily covering developed countries is the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which publishes aggregate data on the income, expenses, assets, and liabilities of various classes of banks (e.g., all commercial banks, only foreign commercial banks, cooperative banks). Data about the number of banks, branches, and employees is also available, broken down by the same classes of banks. This data is available for more than thirty countries, primarily in Europe but also including Chile, Mexico, Israel, Turkey, Japan, South Korea, New Zealand, and the United States. Up to thirty years of time-series data is available for some countries. Access to this data is via OECD StatExtracts (http://stats.oecd.org; see chapter 2).
Minor Sources
Australian Prudential Regulation
Authority Reserve Bank of New Zealand
Australia and New Zealand are two of the few Anglophone countries besides the United States to disseminate bank-level microdata. The Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA), publishes monthly data about specific classes of assets, including various types of loans, of individual banks operating in Australia, 2002 to present (www.apra.gov.au/Pages/default.aspx, “Authorized Deposit-taking Institutions” tab). Data about liabilities, including deposits from households, financial and nonfinancial corporations, and governments, is also available, covering the same time period. The data disseminated by the Reserve Bank of New Zealand (www.rbnz.govt.nz/statistics/banksys/) uses different metrics to report on banks’ financial health, including their profitability by various measures, credit rating, capital adequacy, and impaired assets. This data is available from 1996 to present. Some aggregate data is also available for New Zealand banks, covering the same time period.
Note
1. The data downloads as a compressed file without a file extension, but opening it with standard unzipping software result in tab-delimited data files.