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.