In brief
- No interest rate and no fee changes. The act is a map of correspondences: it tells banks from which items of the reports they send the authorities anyway they are to take the figures for one of the capital requirements, the one for operational risk.
- The table has 51 mapping rows and points to 105 distinct cells, drawn from eight financial reporting templates. Only 20 of the rows have a single cell and no condition; the rest call either for a selection within the item or for a sum that runs up to 18 cells.
- It applies from 23 September 2026, directly, with no Romanian act of alignment. Its counterpart enters into force on the same day, Delegated Regulation (EU) 2026/1167: that one says what is added up, this one says where it is taken from.
Published: Official Journal of the European Union, L series, 2026/1166 of 3 September 2026
In force from: 23 September 2026, the twentieth day following publication, as Article 2 of the regulation provides
Banks in Romania send the National Bank of Romania, at regular intervals, a stack of standardised reports, the same across the European Union, from the structure of the balance sheet to the breakdown of fee income. The same reports are also the source of the small obligations the public rarely sees, such as the interest the central bank pays on minimum reserve requirements. A European Commission regulation published on 3 September 2026 ties the items of those reports to a figure that decides how much capital a bank has to hold for operational risk, that is for losses caused by fraud, by processing errors, by system failures or by cases lost in court. The regulation enters into force on 23 September 2026.
The act is called Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2026/1166, it was adopted in Brussels on 28 May 2026 and it appeared in the Official Journal of the European Union only 98 days after adoption. It has two articles and seven pages, six of which are taken up by a single table. Article 1 is the table. Article 2 says that the regulation enters into force on the twentieth day following publication, which means 23 September 2026, and that it applies directly in all Member States. The legal basis is Article 314(10) of Regulation (EU) No 575/2013, the regulation laying down prudential requirements for credit institutions, known in the trade as the CRR. The text rests on a draft prepared by the European Banking Authority, the Union’s banking supervisor, which published its final report on 16 June 2025.
Three names in the title need translating. An implementing technical standard is a Commission act that fixes the single way in which an existing rule is applied, without adding new rules, so that twenty-seven different national practices do not emerge. Supervisory reporting is the set of templates every bank sends the authority that supervises it, in the case of Romanian banks the National Bank of Romania, which passes them on, in aggregate form, to the European Banking Authority. The financial part of that set is called FINREP and is laid down in Annex I to Implementing Regulation (EU) 2024/3117, the act that replaced the old Regulation (EU) 2021/451 in December 2024.
That leaves the business indicator. It is a measure of the size of a bank built from its profit and loss account and from its balance sheet: interest received and paid, income from rents and from leasing, dividends, fees received and paid, gains and losses from trading, plus part of the assets. From it is calculated the own funds requirement for operational risk, that is the cushion of capital the bank sets aside for the damage caused by the way it runs itself, not by unpaid loans and not by market movements. The larger the indicator, the larger the cushion. It also decides how far other obligations reach: Delegated Regulation (EU) 2026/1167 deals separately with the position of a bank whose indicator temporarily passes EUR 750 million without exceeding EUR 1 billion, the threshold from which an own database of operational risk losses is required.
The table in Article 1 is divided into ten blocks, each carrying in its heading the article of Delegated Regulation (EU) 2026/1167 that defines the component in question: interest income, interest expenses, the asset component, the dividend component, other operating income, other operating expenses, fee and commission income and expenses, the trading book component and the banking book component. Beneath them sit 51 mapping rows, 44 items marked with letters and another 7 sub-points numbered with Roman numerals, gathered under the single item that has a list of its own, that of losses caused by operational risk events. The right-hand column makes 127 references in total, to 105 distinct cells from eight templates: F01.01, F02.00, F16.08, F18.00, F21.00, F22.01, F42.00 and F45.03.
What it changes in practice
The rule covers credit institutions that are Romanian legal persons, that is the banks authorised by the National Bank of Romania, plus the investment firms to which Regulation (EU) No 575/2013 applies on the same terms. The regulation is binding in its entirety and applies directly, so it needs no order, no norm and no circular from the central bank in order to take effect in Romania. Branches of banks from other Union States operating here remain in the care of the supervisor of their home country, and their capital requirement is calculated there.
For a bank’s customer, the direct effect is zero. The act does not touch the interest on a loan, does not touch the servicing fee, does not change lending terms and imposes nothing in the relationship with the customer. Nor could it: a mapping standard says where a figure is taken from, not what the figure has to be.
The effect is felt in two places inside a bank. The first is the reporting department. Until now, the road from a reporting item to an element of the business indicator was a working method each bank devised for itself, built on the text of the basic regulation and on the draft published by the European Banking Authority. From 23 September 2026 it is a binding table, identical in all twenty-seven States, and any departure from it becomes a non-compliance visible at an inspection, not a methodological choice that can be argued for.
The second place is verification. A mapping written into an act means the supervisor can redo the calculation from figures already reported, without asking the bank for anything else. Twenty of the 51 rows are a clean correspondence, a single cell and no condition, so they can be checked automatically. Twenty-five carry a condition written in brackets, of the kind „only from the assets subject to a leasing contract” or „caused by operational risk events”, and those call for a selection within the item, which only the bank can make and only the bank can document.
There is a further effect that concerns precisely the smaller banks, a category into which a good part of the Romanian market falls on the Union’s scale. Twelve of the rows of the table have a fallback route, written expressly for institutions that are not required to report templates F16, F21, F42 or F45. There, the figure is taken from a broader item in template F02.00, taking into account, the act says, „only the amount relevant for the item concerned”. In other words, the fallback route means a manual extraction from a total, not a shorter template, and the bank must be able to justify it afterwards. Who falls into that category is settled in Implementing Regulation (EU) 2024/3117.
The timetable for application is simple, because the act provides for no intermediate stage and no transitional provision. The mapping binds from 23 September 2026. The first ordinary quarterly reference date for reporting that falls after that deadline is 30 September 2026, seven days away.
What has changed compared with the previous situation
Until 23 September 2026, the correspondence between the elements of the business indicator and the reporting items existed, but it bound nobody. It lived in the draft published by the European Banking Authority in June 2025 and in the internal procedures each bank had written for itself. A supervisor could ask for explanations; he could not invoke a text. From that date, the text exists and it is the same everywhere.
The target of the references has changed too. The mandate given to the European Banking Authority concerned the mapping with the templates in Implementing Regulation (EU) 2021/451, which was then the reporting act in force. In the meantime, that one was repealed and replaced by Implementing Regulation (EU) 2024/3117, and the table now adopted refers to Annex I to the new act. Footnote 2 of the regulation says so directly. For a bank, the difference is not cosmetic: the row codes changed on the move between the two reporting acts, and an internal procedure written on the old codes no longer fits.
The third change is one of coverage. The table stops at the financial component calculated under the accounting approach, that is at Articles 10 and 11 of Delegated Regulation (EU) 2026/1167. A bank choosing the other route provided for by that regulation, the approach based on prudential boundaries in Article 12, finds no row of its own here. It starts from the same elements, since Article 12(1) says that the very elements in Articles 10 and 11 are adjusted, but the adjustment stays outside the mapping. The choice between the two routes is not free: Article 13 of the same delegated regulation requires a notification to the competent authority, that is to the National Bank of Romania, at least ninety days in advance.
What has not changed at all is the figure itself. The rules by which the business indicator and the capital requirement are calculated are untouched: they sit in Regulation (EU) No 575/2013 and in the delegated regulation published on the same day. The mapping neither raises nor lowers any capital requirement. What it does is make two banks with the same figures in their reports arrive at the same indicator, which was not guaranteed before.
Advantages and disadvantages
What it improves
- Two banks with the same figures in their reports now arrive at the same business indicator, because the road from item to element is written down, not inferred.
- The supervisor can redo the calculation from the data he already holds, without asking the bank for a separate reconciliation.
- The act applies directly and simultaneously in all Member States, so a bank in an international group uses the same mapping across all its subsidiaries.
- Twenty of the 51 rows are a clean correspondence, a single cell and no condition, so they can be checked automatically, with no human intervention.
- Twelve rows have a fallback route for banks that do not report the extended templates, so the rule asks no new templates of the smaller institutions.
- The references are made to the reporting act in force, Regulation (EU) 2024/3117, not to the repealed one, so the table is usable from day one.
What remains a problem
- The text was adopted on 28 May 2026 and published on 3 September 2026, 98 days apart, in a field where banks needed it earlier.
- The calculation framework the mapping serves has applied since 1 January 2025, so the binding map arrives 631 days after the work it organises began.
- Recital (2) announces a perfect correspondence „in most cases”, yet only 20 of the 51 rows are clean, that is fewer than two in five.
- One of the two routes allowed for the financial component, the approach based on prudential boundaries, has no row at all in the table.
- The cell codes are written inconsistently: 18 references have the row number on three digits instead of four, and two templates appear under two spellings, F02 alongside F02.00 and F45.3 alongside F45.03.
- Twenty-five rows call for a selection within the item, which only the bank can make, so the comparability promised stops exactly where it is hardest to verify.
Practical advice
- If you are a bank customer, you have nothing to do. The act changes no interest rate, no fee and no contract term, and an offer that invokes „the new European rules” as a reason for charging more does not rest on this text.
- Read the two regulations together, not separately. Delegated Regulation (EU) 2026/1167 says what is added up, Implementing Regulation (EU) 2026/1166 says where it is taken from; each of them, on its own, is incomplete.
- Check whether your internal calculation procedure refers to the templates in Regulation (EU) 2024/3117 or to those in Regulation (EU) 2021/451, which has been repealed. A procedure written on the old codes leads to items that no longer exist under the same numbering.
- Document separately the 25 rows that carry a condition in brackets. There the figure is not taken from a cell but chosen out of it, and at an inspection the criterion of choice has to be capable of being shown.
- If the institution does not report templates F16, F21, F42 or F45, prepare the justification for the 12 fallback routes in good time. They call for extracting an amount from a total, that is exactly the kind of operation that gets challenged at a control.
- At point (v) in the block „Other operating expenses”, go by the cell on the right, not by the name on the left. The name is not the one in the delegated regulation and it overlaps with that of another point in the same list.
- If you intend to move to the approach based on prudential boundaries, remember the ninety days of prior notification to the National Bank of Romania required by Article 13 of Delegated Regulation (EU) 2026/1167. The period runs before the change, not after.
Frequently asked questions
Will loans become more expensive because of this regulation?
What is the business indicator, in short?
What does operational risk mean?
Which banks in Romania fall under the rule?
Does a Romanian act have to be adopted for the regulation to apply?
What is its connection with Delegated Regulation (EU) 2026/1167?
Do the templates banks send change?
Why did it take so long from adoption to publication?
Errors and inconsistencies in the published text
- Article 1, the table, the block „Other operating expenses”, point (d)(v). The row bears the name „impairment”, although the element it maps is called „depreciation” in Article 6(1)(d)(v) of Delegated Regulation (EU) 2026/1167, published on the same day and in the same journal. The name used here is in fact the name of point (vii) in the same list, „impairment or (-) reversal of impairment”, which however points to other cells, F02.00_r0460_c0010 and F02.00_r0510_c0010, as against F02.00_r0390_c0010 at point (v). The result is a list in which two points bear the same name, and the one whose name was changed can be recognised only by the cell on the right. Since depreciation caused by operational risk events goes into other operating expenses, and therefore into the business indicator, a wrong classification shows up directly in the own funds requirement.
Editorial analysis
The act solves a real problem and solves it in the only way it could be solved: by writing the correspondence down, instead of leaving it to interpretation. Without it, two banks with exactly the same figures in their reports could arrive at two different business indicators, and the comparability of capital requirements, which is the whole point of a common prudential framework, remained an assumption. With it, the road from item to element can be verified by anyone holding the two acts.
Measured against its own table, however, the act promises more than it delivers. Recital (2) announces that „in most cases there is a perfect correspondence” between the elements of the indicator and the cells in the templates. Counted, the 51 mapping rows show something else: 20 have a single cell and no condition, that is fewer than two in five; 25 carry a condition written in brackets, calling for a selection within the item; 12 have a fallback route for institutions that do not report the extended templates. A single row, that of fee and commission income, gathers 18 cells from template F22.01. Perfect correspondence is therefore in the minority, and where it is not perfect the choice again falls to the bank, that is precisely where comparability is hardest to control. The gap between what the recital says and what the table shows changes no obligation, but it changes the expectation with which the text is read.
The second observation is one of timing and comes from subtracting two dates. The revised operational risk framework in Regulation (EU) No 575/2013, for which the business indicator is calculated, has applied since 1 January 2025. The binding mapping enters into force on 23 September 2026, that is 631 days later. Throughout that interval banks calculated the indicator anyway, because the obligation existed, but they calculated it on a method of their own, each on its own. Of the 631 days, 98 are the distance between the adoption of the act in Brussels, on 28 May 2026, and its publication, on 3 September 2026, and those are nowhere explained in the text. The practical effect is a restart: the figures already calculated and reported are reread against the new map, and every difference has to be explained to the supervisor, although nobody had broken anything.
The third observation concerns what is missing from the table. The financial component can be calculated by two routes, and the table covers only one, the accounting approach in Articles 10 and 11 of Delegated Regulation (EU) 2026/1167. The approach based on prudential boundaries in Article 12 has no row at all, although it starts from the same elements and although moving to it requires ninety days’ notice to the competent authority. From the same quarter comes the uneven care taken over the codes: 18 of the 127 references write the row number on three digits instead of four, and two templates appear under two spellings in the same table, F02 alongside F02.00 and F45.3 alongside F45.03. These are typographical mistakes, not mistakes of substance, but in an act whose only content is a list of codes meant to be read by machine, the typography is the substance. Finally, the preamble itself gets confused about what kind of act this is: recital (3) says the regulation is based on a draft of „regulatory technical standards”, although the title, Article 1, the basis in Article 314(10) and even the following recital speak of implementing standards, which are something else and are adopted under a different procedure.
What should be changed
- The name of point (v) in the block „Other operating expenses” should be brought into line with the delegated regulation. A row bearing the name of another row in the same list can be read wrongly however clear the cell code on the right may be, and the corrigendum costs a single line.
- The table should say, at the two rows that point to the same cell, how the figure is to be split. The profits in Article 5(c) and the losses in Article 6(1)(c) are both taken to F02.00_r0600_c0010, without any of the conditions in brackets the table uses everywhere else. Two banks reading in good faith may allocate differently.
- The approach based on prudential boundaries should be given rows of its own as well. Otherwise the bank that chooses it is left with a mapping written for the other route and with an undocumented adjustment, which brings back exactly the diversity of practice the act sets out to close.
- The cell codes should be normalised to four digits and to a single spelling of the template. A table meant to be read by machine that writes F02 alongside F02.00 and r090 alongside r0090 obliges every addressee to repair the same thing, separately.
- Recital (3) should be corrected. An act that presents itself in the preamble as a regulatory standard and in the title as an implementing standard leaves a needless doubt about the procedure under which it was adopted.
- The National Bank of Romania should publish guidance for the institutions using the 12 fallback routes. Extracting an amount from an aggregated item is the most contestable operation in the whole table, and a common criterion, announced in advance, costs less than twenty readings corrected one by one, at an inspection.
Original text of the legal act
The text below is reproduced in Romanian, the official form of publication.
The full text, as published in the Official Gazette of Romania
Official Journal of the European Union, L series, 2026/1166 of 3 September 2026 7 pages PDF, 536 KB
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This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. For specific situations, consult a licensed attorney or tax advisor.