IRA continuously assesses and adapts our analysis and reporting engine as part of our effort to stay abreast of  an ever evolving U.S. economy.  Users of the IRA Bank Monitor received a number of in-line upgrades to the reports appearing in their subscriptions earlier this week.  We have added another one.

IRA has activated qualitative indications to show whether banks are SUPERIOR, AVERAGE, or INFERIOR with respect to their asset class peers with regards to their preparedness to absorb market risks; more specifically, interest rate and/or other systemic economic scenario risks.  These are a group of risk measurements indicating the ability of a bank to absorb  external shocks by either building buffers against or pruning exposures to such shocks.  These old Basel One era risk measures have been relatively benign for a number of years but changes in the forces surrounding the economy now seem to make it prudent that IRA's Bank Monitor begin tracking the positioning of banks to maintain these buffers in good order in case they are needed.  These measures augment IRA's Basel III Capital testing and Basel II Op Risk testing modules.

This upgrade appears in all versions of the IRA Bank Monitor including the Professional IRA Bank Monitor, the IRABankRatings.com Unlimited-Use subscription service, and the IRABankRatings.com Shopping Cart.

Institutional Risk Analytics continuously updates our reports to to keep pace with changing business decision needs of our customers.  We have added the following new reporting items to our standard reports,

Simple Liquidity Test

This is a simple ratio cash, coin and cash equivalents to total deposits that several of you have been asking for.  It gives a simplistic estimate of the bank's ability to pay demand depositors in the event of a run on deposits.  This is a rather old measure going back to the bank runs of the 1930's.  We of course also display a short term Acid Test which is more relevant to vendors and creditors as well an Asset-Liability test based on two illustrative stress scenarios to help counterparties assess the safety of their assets.

Derivative Leverage Analysis

This new test computes the leverage ratio of the notional to fair value envelope for traded derivatives at a bank.  It augments IRA's unrealized loss cushion test that reports on how much of the bank's derivatives need to be lost to burn through the instituions risk based capital.

Subsidiaries Lists for Bank Holding Companies

This list always appeared in the Professional version of our product but was inadvertently omitted from the IRABankRatings.com display version.  It has been added back.  For our IRABankRatings.com Unlimited-Use customers, you can click on each of the subsidiaries to immediately open up a view on these certificate units.  No more hunting around particularly for those BHC's whose subsidiary names bear little resemblance ot the parent's name.

For Professional IRA Bank Monitor subscribers, we have also added the following:

Raw Data Tools

All Professional product subscribers now have access to IRA's raw "data to the desktop" tool that will deliver data extracts from FDIC Call Reports, Federal Reserve Y9C's and NCUA 5300 Reports in HTML, Excel or XML.

Basel Report

We have updated the Basel Report in our Professional system to show historical compliance with Basel III capital requirements minima. The Basel III report section also includes repoting on the U.S. capital requirements tests.   Basel II measurements continue to include performance tracking calculations on Loss Experience, Loss Given Default, Weighted Maturiity and Exposure at Default computations.

Performance Matrices with Extended Lookback

Professional services users now have one-click options to extend performance table reports on banks with up to ten (10) years historical reports computed quartertly.   One additional click dumps it to your Excel speadsheet.