Page 247 - Special Topic Session (STS) - Volume 3

STS 543 Luís T. D. et al.
1. Introduction
The Great Financial Crisis of 2007-08 (GFC) drew attention to the existing
gaps in the availability of detailed information needed for timely risk
assessment. In fact, although very relevant for central banks, traditional
aggregate statistics have proved insufficient to monitor and analyse the many
aspects of the monetary transmission mechanism and the evolution of credit
to companies and households.
Early on, the Banco de Portugal (hereinafter referred to as “the Bank”)
understood that complementing aggregate statistics with more granular data
is not only an answer to the need for more flexible and detailed information,
1
but also a movement towards more efficient and reliable reporting systems .
This is particularly true in situations where a single report of granular data has
the potential to substitute several reports of aggregate information,
representing different perspectives on a given reality (e.g., credit). In such
cases – of which the Portuguese Central Credit Register (CCR) is a good
example –, central banks have the possibility to build a consistent and
coherent multipurpose granular database, which could then be used by the
various functions of those institutions, each of them analysing the granular
dataset from its own perspective. This choice would increase not only the
flexibility of the data, but also the efficiency of the reporting systems
themselves.
The Portuguese CCR was created in the late 1970s with the objective of
providing the participating institutions with relevant information to assist
them in the assessment of risks when granting credit. Despite the significant
changes that the CCR has undergone over the ensuing four decades, its
original objective still remains as its main drive. Nevertheless, the CCR is
nowadays used for a very diverse set of purposes related to specific functions
of the Bank – e.g., statistics, prudential and conduct supervision, economic
research, monetary policy, financial stability analysis and risk management.
In this paper, we present the main recent changes in the Bank’s CCR and
explain how the new, redesigned, loan-by-loan database will help the Bank to
fulfil its mission, highlighting the importance of the availability of such
granular information to assess the compliance of financial institutions with the
recently enacted macroprudential measures. In section 2, we provide a brief
overview of the key features of the new Portuguese CCR; section 3 focuses on
the role of the CCR in supporting the Bank’s macroprudential analysis and
policymaking function; section 4 presents some final remarks.

1
For a more detailed analysis on how the Banco de Portugal has been complementing traditional
aggregate statistics with granular data, particularly in the field of monetary and financial statistics,
please see Dias & Silva (2017).
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