Methodology

Instrument data

Debt instruments are sourced from the European Securities and Markets Authority’s Financial Instruments Reference Data System (FIRDS), which consolidates the reference data that trading venues across the EU report under MiFIR. The database ingests the daily FIRDS delta files and retains every debt instrument issued by an entity in our universe. Instruments that FIRDS reports as terminated are marked inactive but never deleted, so the historical record remains complete.

FIRDS publishes one record per instrument and trading venue; we aggregate them by ISIN. A venue-level termination does not deactivate an instrument while another venue still reports it.

Seniority classification

Each instrument is assigned one seniority class — Additional Tier 1, Tier 2, senior non-preferred, senior preferred, covered or unknown — through a fixed cascade, and the step that decided the classification is stored alongside it:

1. The debt seniority field reported to FIRDS, mapped per the ISO 20022 code list (senior, subordinated, junior, mezzanine).
2. The instrument’s CFI code, whose fourth character encodes seniority for debt classes.
3. A conservative set of name patterns for structures the reported fields cannot distinguish, such as senior non-preferred and covered bonds.

When no step produces a confident answer the instrument is labelled “unknown” rather than guessed. The reported seniority field does not distinguish preferred from non-preferred senior debt, so name evidence takes precedence for that split.

Entity universe

The universe covers banking groups under the remit of the Single Resolution Board, the significant institutions supervised by the ECB, and a set of non–banking union groups (United Kingdom, Switzerland, Nordics) relevant to the European MREL market. Legal names, legal entity identifiers and group structures come from the Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation (GLEIF), refreshed weekly. Changes to the universe itself are reviewed manually before they are applied; entities are never removed automatically.

Disclosed metrics

Capital and MREL metrics are transcribed from official publications — EBA transparency exercises, resolution reports and the institutions’ own Pillar 3 disclosures — with the source and date attached to each value. Where an institution has not published a figure, the site shows Not disclosed. A missing value is never rendered as zero, and no figure is ever interpolated or estimated.

Editorial content

Glossary definitions, case studies and articles are drafted with the assistance of language models against a strict template, and published only after review by the editor. Editorial systems have no write access to instrument or metric data. Each published page records when it was last reviewed.

Update cadence

Corrections

Errors reported through the contact page are checked against the primary source and corrected in the underlying data, so the fix propagates to every page that renders the value. See Sources for the full list of primary sources and their licences.