EBA revises ITS validation list and moves guidance to a new web home — what banks and market watchers need to know

What the EBA changed and where to find the update

The European Banking Authority (EBA) has published a revised list of validation rules that apply to ITS supervisory reporting and said the material — including the updated rule list — will be hosted in a new section of its website. The agency issued the announcement in a press release on 12 December 2025 and said the new web location is now live on the EBA site.

At its core, the update pares back or deactivates a set of automated validation checks that are used when banks submit standardized supervisory data. The EBA framed the move as a pragmatic step to stop incorrect rejects and to give time to fix underlying rule or IT problems. The agency also signalled a schedule for publishing corrected rules and documentation in the new web area.

Which ITS validation rules were deactivated — causes and examples

The EBA says it has deactivated a selective group of validation rules rather than taking a blanket approach. The press note attributes the removals largely to two problems: rules that were inaccurate in their logical test and rules that were creating IT instability in national reporting systems. In plain terms, some checks were flagging valid data as invalid, and others were tripping error cascades in reporting pipelines.

While the EBA did not list every technical identifier in its summary, it made clear that the affected rules include checks tied to field-level consistency (for example, where two related cells must add up), plausibility gates (values that fall well outside expected ranges) and certain duplicate-record detectors. The agency described most of the deactivations as temporary measures while it corrects or redesigns the test logic and stabilises IT delivery. A smaller subset, the EBA said, will be removed permanently because the underlying constraint is no longer appropriate for current reporting templates.

The EBA emphasised that deactivations were targeted to avoid undermining the overall reporting framework; it also promised a timetable for re-introducing corrected checks and for publishing detailed technical notes in the new web location.

What this means for banks, supervisors and market participants

Validation rules in ITS reporting are the engine that stops bad or inconsistent data reaching supervisors. When a rule is deactivated, two things happen at once: banks avoid automatic rejections on certain items, and supervisors temporarily lose an automatic quality gate that helped them spot oddities early.

For banks, the immediate practical effect is fewer hard rejections during filing runs on the specific checks that were switched off. That reduces time lost on repeated resubmissions but also places a bigger burden on firms to ensure those fields are correct before filing. For supervisors — and for the competent authorities who use this data — the change raises the risk that some inconsistencies will only surface later in manual checks or in reconciliation work.

From a market perspective, the change can have two kinds of impact. First, short-term volatility in reported metrics is possible if firms had relied on the deactivated checks to prevent outlying items; examples include temporary shifts in reported asset composition, loan-loss provisioning patterns or line-by-line exposures in templates. Second, investors and analysts may see a rise in restatements, reconciliations or extended footnotes as supervisors and banks work through fixes. None of this necessarily signals a sudden deterioration in bank health, but it does increase noise in supervisory data and heightens the importance of reading accompanying explanations from firms and regulators.

Immediate actions and monitoring priorities for banks and investors

Banks should treat the deactivations as an operational wake-up call: review internal controls on the affected fields, run parallel reconciliations against previous submissions, and keep an audit trail of any adjustments made while rules are offline. Competent authorities are likely to ask for additional ownership assurances and may run targeted reconciliations themselves.

Investors and analysts should focus on three watchpoints: (1) reconciled differences between current and prior supervisory filings, (2) any footnote disclosures or ad-hoc communications from banks explaining changes in reported items, and (3) updates from the EBA on when corrected validation logic will be reintroduced. These signals will tell you whether deviations are technical housekeeping or early signs of reporting tension that could affect prudential metrics.

Why ITS validation rules matter — brief background and precedent

The ITS supervisory reporting framework standardises what banks must send to supervisors across the EU. Validation rules are an automated layer that checks that submitted data fits logical, format and plausibility expectations before it is accepted into supervisory databases. That automation reduces manual work, speeds analysis, and helps keep public and supervisory figures comparable.

The EBA has adjusted validation rules before when templates changed or when the agency found that a specific test produced false positives. The current move follows that precedent: temporary deactivations are a common regulatory tool to prevent the reporting process from breaking while the technical fix is developed and rolled out.

For now, the revision is mainly a data-quality and process story. The deeper test will come as corrected rules return and supervisors and banks reconcile the intervening period. Market watchers should not ignore the update, but they should expect the noise to settle once the EBA publishes the corrected rule set and the new website section completes its documentation work.

Sources

• eba.europa.eu