ECB publishes structural financial indicators for 2012

Today the European Central Bank (ECB) is publishing a dataset of structural financial indicators for the banking sector in the European Union (EU). They comprise statistics on the number of local units (branches) and employees of EU credit institutions, as well as data on the degree of concentration of the banking sector in each of the EU Member States, and data on the share of foreign-controlled institutions in the different national banking markets of the EU.

The structural indicators show that, in a majority of EU Member States, the number of branches of credit institutions has continued the downward trend observed in previous years. About 218,000 branches of credit institutions existed at the end of 2012 in the EU. The number of bank employees of credit institutions in the EU has also continued to decline, to about 3.04 million people. The data also show that the degree of concentration and the share of foreign-controlled institutions continue to vary significantly across national banking sectors.

The structural financial indicators are published by the ECB on an annual basis.