Beijing plans to dramatically expand the scope and scrutiny of its statistical collection measures and launch a nationwide basic financial database, as part of efforts to forestall systemic financial risk.
PBOC recently held a press conference to address questions in relation to the “State Council Office Opinions on Comprehensively Advance Financial Sector Comprehensive Statistical Work” (国务院办公厅关于全面推进金融业综合统计工作的意见) issued several days previously.
A PBOC spokesperson said that “comprehensive financial sector statistics are a vital component of the state’s financial infrastructure, and hastening the advance of comprehensive financial sector statistics has major significance for supporting the finance sector’s ‘servicing of the real economy, prevention of financial risk and deepening of financial reform.'”
According to the spokesperson regulators hope to establish a comprehensive financial sector statistical system that encompasses all financial institutions, financial infrastructure and financial activity, as well as the establishment of a nation-wide database.
The spokesperson emphasised the need for “comprehensive coverage” encompassing the full chain of all financial transactions, as well as a close focus on new financial conditions, new products, and their appropriate inclusion within the scope of statistical monitoring.
The Opinions recently released by the State Council outline the following key work points:
1.Making the asset management products of financial institutions the “breakthrough point” for statistics; establish statistical collection for cross-asset financial products, and effectively monitor and collect statistics on cross-sector and cross-market financial activities.
2. Establish statistical collection for systemically important financial institutions, and comprehensively grasp the level of influence of systemically important financial institutions on the financial system, as well as promptly uncover risk transmission points and key hidden risks.
3. Establish statistical collection for financial conglomerates including financial holding companies, to support judgements on internal affiliate transactions and grade external risk transmission.
4. Formulate finance sector balance sheets, improve statistics of financial fund flows and stocks, clearly ascertain the truth of the financial system, and strengthen the foundations for macro-leverage monitoring.
5. Improve monetary and credit statistics, strengthen specialist statistics for green financing and financial inclusion.
6. Establish and improve bond market statistics and statistics for other financial infrastructure, and effectively identify market risk and channels for transmission.
7. Launch the construction of a national basic financial database, by first establishing a comprehensive financial sector statistics collation platform.
