Bank Lending Survey (BLS)

The main objective of the bank lending survey (BLS) is to enhance the Eurosystem's knowledge of bank lending conditions in the euro area. The BLS provides input for the ECB Governing Council's assessment of monetary and economic developments, on which it bases its monetary policy decisions.

It provides information on the lending policies of euro area banks and complements existing statistics on loans and bank lending rates with information on loan supply and demand for enterprises and households. The survey addresses issues such as credit standards for approving loans, as well as credit terms and conditions applied to new loans to enterprises and households. It also asks for an assessment of loan demand.

The bank lending survey is addressed to senior loan officers of a representative sample of euro area banks and is conducted four times a year. The sample group participating in the survey comprises around 140 banks from all euro area countries and takes into account the characteristics of their respective national banking structures.

The results of the individual banks participating in the BLS sample are aggregated in two steps. In the first step, banks’ replies can either be aggregated to national results by applying an implicit weighting through the sample selection or, alternatively, banks’ replies can be aggregated by applying an   explicit weighting scheme based on the amounts outstanding of loans to non-financial corporations and households of the individual banks in the respective national samples. In the second step, the national survey results are aggregated to euro area BLS results by applying an explicit weighting scheme based on the national shares in the amounts outstanding of loans to euro area non-financial corporations and households. For France, Malta, the Netherlands and Slovakia, net percentages are weighted based on the amounts outstanding of loans of the individual banks in the respective national samples.

Bank lending survey data presented in the ECB Statistical Data Warehouse (SDW) are organized along the lines of the questionnaire:

1. Supply
2. Demand
3. Ad-hoc

The main objective of the survey is to enhance the Eurosystem"s knowledge of bank lending conditions in the euro area. The BLS provides input for the ECB Governing Council"s assessment of monetary and economic developments, on which it bases its monetary policy decisions.

It provides information on the lending policies of euro area banks and complements existing statistics on loans and bank lending rates with information on loan supply and demand for enterprises and households. The survey addresses issues such as credit standards for approving loans, as well as credit terms and conditions applied to new loans to enterprises and households. It also asks for an assessment of loan demand.

The survey is addressed to senior loan officers of a representative sample of euro area banks and is conducted four times a year. The sample group participating in the survey comprises banks from all euro area countries and takes into account the characteristics of their respective national banking structures.
For more information, please refer to the ECB website.

The analysis of the aggregate BLS results focuses on the "net percentage", which is the difference between the share of banks reporting that credit standards applied to loan approval have been tightened and the share of banks reporting that they have been eased. Likewise, the term "net demand" refers to the difference between the share of banks reporting an increase in loan demand over the past three months and the share of banks reporting a decline.

In addition to the "net percentage", the ECB also publishes the weighted difference ("diffusion index") between the share of banks reporting that credit standards  have been tightened and the share of banks reporting that they have been eased. The diffusion index is constructed in the following way: lenders who have answered "considerably" are given a weight twice as high (score of 1) as lenders having answered "somewhat" (score of 0.5). 

For further information, please refer to the BLS user guide on the the ECB website.