1. Wiesbaden Group on Business Registers
The role of administrative sources in the ECB’s ‘Register of Institutions and Assets Database’ (RIAD)
Peter Neudorfer
Wiesbaden Group on Business Registers
Session No 4 on Cooperation with Administrative Sources
Tallinn, September 2010

2. Main features of RIAD
RIAD (“Register of Institutions and Assets Database”) is an application operated by the ECB that collects business information from individual ESCB members and disseminates the combined data to the entire ESCB and makes the combined data available to the public
RIAD processes important monetary policy and statistical data
Currently RIAD maintains three lists of financial institutions
10,000 Monetary Financial Institutions (MFIs), i.e. basically Credit Institutions and Money Market Funds
49,000 Investment Funds (IFs)
3,000 Financial Vehicle Corporations (FVCs)
The main objective of maintaining these lists is to facilitate the production of comprehensive and consistent euro area financial statistics by ensuring that the statistical reporting population is complete, accurate and homogenously defined

3. Current sources of RAID
In substance, the “national segments” in RIAD are updated by the NCB of the respective EU Member State, via
‘internal sources’, i.e. own initiatives of NCBs in maintaining the respective registers of reporting agents,
‘external sources’, which in fact predominantly represent the business registers operated by NSIs,
commercial sources and
information derived from national supervisory authorities (NSAs); against the common definition of administrative sources as “data that are not primarily collected for statistical purposes” these can be classified as a genuine administrative sources.
Currently 27 EU countries maintain a MFI list in RIAD; 25 member states operate an IF and 24 counties a FVC list

4. Sources behind the current RIAD datasets Percentage of NCBs in the EU that employ a particular type of source, per RIAD list

5. Overlap of sources for the current RIAD datasets Number of NCBs in the EU that employ administrative and additional sources

6. Further findings
As ‘statistical’ business registers have to serve purposes beyond the information needs of supervision further transformations are applied to convert administrative data into statistical data.
Currently no legal constraints that would limit the (public) usage of supervisory data for statistical purposes (and vice versa) are observed.
Although NCBs and NSIs are addressing similar reporting populations there is apparently only little alignment between the reference data used. In the same vein, only in rare cases is any feedback given to, or requested by, the respective sources of RIAD data.

7. Selected features of the three RIAD datasets Percentage of NCB contributions with a particular feature, per RIAD list

8. Towards an ESCB register of financial institutions
In the ECB and NCBs agreed to enhance the current lists into a full-fledged statistical register of financial corporations
Completing the coverage of all types of financial corporations, e.g. include insurance corporations and pension funds;
Supplementing the current list of attributes, e.g. with ID codes of other business registers or size variables;
Adopting the data model implemented in the business registers of NSIs, i.e. explicitly adopting the concept of ‘legal units‘ and ‘statistical units’. The aim is to model enterprise and enterprise group structures and prepare for the collection and processing of data on financial sector group structures.
The ‘enhanced RIAD’ would serve for monetary and financial statistics, macro-prudential analysis as well as monetary policy analysis and operation.
This register will also be coordinated with the ‘EuroGroups Register’ (EGR) on multinational enterprises operated by Eurostat in liaison with NSIs.