, has been implementing two ecb regulations on enhanced monetary financial institutions ’ balance sheet statistics and on securitisation vehicles. 6 these regulations introduced reporting requirements for loan securitisations, in particular, and new statistics on the assets and liabilities of these vehicles. the aim is to compile more detailed monthly and quarterly data to be published for the first time in june 2011. in addition, new statistics on euro area money market funds and on other investment funds, including hedge funds, 7 were released in december 2009. following the adoption of the new ecb regulation addressing banks ’ interest rate statistics, 8 the monthly banks ’ interest rate statistics are now produced more quickly and are available already one month after the governing council ’ s monetary policy decisions. further new and enhanced statistics are being compiled based on data already available at the national level, such as data from credit registers and supervisory data. a key example is detailed statistics on insurance companies and pension funds, which are also expected to be published from june 2011 onwards. as you can see, there is considerable and very tangible progress in the area of monetary and financial statistics. all these developments will contribute to enhanced monetary analysis and are also available for in - depth financial stability analysis. the economic analysis of our monetary policy strategy benefits from much more consistent statistics on the euro area balance of payments. the size of the statistical discrepancy in balance of payments statistics has been decreasing substantially in recent years. the quality of these statistics has also improved, in particular by drawing on the centralised securities database ( csdb ), 9 phase 2 of which went live in spring 2009. the csdb also supports the compilation of investment fund statistics, the residual maturity of government debt securities and new statistics on securitisation vehicles. the ecb will publish the results of the third wave of the joint ecb and european commission survey on the access to finance of small and medium - sized enterprises in the euro area later this week, and fieldwork is being carried out for the eurosystem survey on household finance and consumption. the flagship of the cooperation between the escb and the ess on european statistics remains the quarterly euro area accounts. these provide a consistent statistical framework for the ecb ’ s monetary and economic analysis, both for transactions and balance sheets. the euro area accounts are also widely used in the ecb financial stability review. the main challenge remains more timely delivery, no later than 90 days after the end of the an updated overview of all available ec

would be best complemented by a public reference data utility providing standardised ecofin council conclusions on eu statistics of 4 november 2008 and on 10 november 2009. see also the article entitled “ update on developments in general economic statistics for the euro area ”, in the february 2010 issue of the ecb monthly bulletin. information on instruments and entities that would be operated on the basis of an international agreement. the fourth type of statistical deliverable is ad hoc information obtained via one - off surveys where it is undisputed among statisticians that only regular and tested data flows that are connected to the internal accounting systems of reporting agents limit the reporting burden with a lasting effect, and produce a timely and reliable output. concerning the “ input ” – namely the collection of data – the reporting burden of financial institutions could be reduced by improving processes to ensure that information is only reported once. one example of this streamlining is the use of supervisory data to compile macro - financial statistics. here, the ecb and the committee of european banking supervisors ( cebs ) have published a bridging manual aligning the ecb ’ s monetary and financial statistics requirements with the supervisory reporting templates developed by cebs and have created a relational database identifying similarities and differences between the two frameworks. 12 it is even more important to reach a common understanding on the regular flow of data from the reporting agents in the eu financial system, via national and european databases, to the esrb. in this context, i also welcome the fact that the ecb and ceiops 13 are working on an optimised usage of the future data reporting by the insurance sector under the solvency ii directive 14. clearly, there is a difference between the use of confidential micro - data for statistical purposes and their use for policy purposes. this distinction is respected in the dayto - day business of any developed statistics function. to achieve detailed agreements on the flow of data, i count of a very fruitful cooperation between the three future european supervisory authorities and their predecessors, cebs, ceiops and cesr 15 with the esrb preparatory secretariat recently established at the ecb and our directorate general statistics. the statistics departments of the national central banks of the eu member states are involved via the escb statistics committee. 4. european statistics as a model for global statistics the financial crisis not only had an impact on individual economies and groups of countries ; it also had a global dimension. the group of twenty finance ministers and central bank governors (