Record Banking Profits in Q1?
The ECB, namely its supervisory unit (the Single Supervisory Mechanism), has just reported Q1 2021 data. We took a look at the profit data buried in its huge data package and found surprisingly upbeat news:
According to ECB/SSM German banks had a record start to the year, generating a pre tax profit of €3.9bn in Q1 2021, which is encouraging news after a tough 2020. The same holds true for Eurozone banks in total as well as Spanish and Belgian institutes.
Soft Disclaimer: ECB/SSM data has to be taken with a grain of salt. The data universe covers only (the largest) 114 Eurozone banks. For Germany the universe is particularly small, consisting of a mere 40 (21 groups) out of a total sample of 1.494 German banks (both end March 2021). It is therefore obvious that ECB/SSM data is not fully representative. Especially savings and coperative banks are heavily underweight.
We take the above as a positive sign anyway!