Never the Twain Shall Meet? Addressing the Disconnect between Banks’ Financial and Regulatory Reporting

This paper reviews the arguments for and against the decoupling of capital ratio calculations based on IFRS from those based on Basel II. We analyse recent trends in both accounting and regulatory supervision after the financial crisis and identify areas where there are still deficiencies in the transparency of IFRS-based financial reports and regulatory-based capital disclosures and calculations. We find that the variation in disclosure practices across IFRS and BIS-based capital estimations is significant for a sample of major European banks. We also identify how, for a large Swiss bank, variations in IFRS asset and capital bases for capital ratio calculations can make disclosures more transparent. We find evidence that the
extent of variation between regulatory-based capital and IFRS-based capital is related to the size of the bank, the extent of off-balance-sheet activities and subordinated debt, the net interest margin, return on assets. Variation in disclosure of the leverage ratio is related to bank size, subordinated debt exposure, return on assets, and cost efficiency. We recommend that banks enhance the scope and nature of the reconciliation of IFRS to BIS-based capital ratios to improve the efficiency of markets in reducing information asymmetry about these variations.