Banks, Financial Services, Latvia, Legislation

The regulations have been changed to facilitate receiving additional data for the purposes of creditworthiness assessment, macroeconomic analysis and supervision of financial market participants. The Council of the Bank of Latvia approved Regulation for the Credit Register, Regulation for Provision of Information on the Credit Institutions' Credit Exposures and the Persons Involved and Regulation for Electronic Information Exchange with the Bank of Latvia.

The central bank’s representatives explained that the changes were introduced in line with the planned amendments to the Credit Register Law and to implement the requirements set forth by Regulation (EU) No 2016/867 of the European Central Bank of May 18, 2016 on the collection of granular credit and credit risk data (ECB/2016/13), inter alia providing for the development of analytical credit datasets (AnaCredit). At the same time, these changes represent an improvement to the Credit Register aimed at having a uniform system that would contain the data required by the Credit Register participants for assessment of creditworthiness as well as additional data on financial services associated with credit risk required by the Bank of Latvia and the Financial and Capital Market Commission to perform their tasks. The Credit Register participants will have to report data once, to the Credit Register, instead of reporting to two individual institutions.

The amended reporting procedure will take effect on April 1, 2018. There will be a transitional period for reviewing all valid customer's and customer guarantor's obligations and updating the respective records in the Credit Register according to the new requirements by September 30, 2018. It is expected that additional data for supervisory purposes will be reported to the Credit Register as of April 1, 2019.