The collected data will encompass various aspects of diversity, such as gender, age, educational and professional background, and geographical origin of management body members.

The European Banking Authority (EBA) has released the final Guidelines on the benchmarking of diversity practices, covering diversity policies and gender pay gap issues under the Capital Requirements Directive (CRD) and the Investment Firms Directive (IFD).

This initiative by the EBA aims to enhance transparency in their approach to diversity and gender equality, and also to improve the quality and awareness of the data collected in this field.

Management body composition, diversity policies, and gender pay gaps

These Guidelines are specifically targeted at institutions and investment firms, which are now expected to provide data on the diversity of their management body and information on the gender pay gap upon request. The EBA has determined that this data will be gathered from a representative sample of these entities regarding their diversity policies and practices, as well as the gender pay gap at the management level, every three years.

To facilitate this, the EBA Board of Supervisors has made a decision on the technical aspects to be considered for sampling these institutions.

The legal basis for these Guidelines is rooted in Article 91(11) of the CRD and Article 9(1) of the MiFID Directive, which mandate the EBA and competent authorities to benchmark diversity practices in management bodies of institutions and investment firms. Additionally, the collection of information on the gender pay gap of members of the management body is required under Article 75(1) of the CRD and 34(1) of the IFD.

The new reporting format, as outlined in the Guidelines, will be implemented for data collection in 2025, with the reporting date set for 31 December 2024.

The EBA’s ‘Guidelines on the benchmarking of diversity practices’ are a crucial step towards standardizing the benchmarking of diversity practices, including management body composition, diversity policies, and gender pay gaps in institutions and investment firms.

These Guidelines will enable competent authorities to monitor diversity trends over time and identify common practices for diversity policies, as well as provide information on the gender pay gap at the management level.

The collected data will encompass various aspects of diversity, such as gender, age, educational and professional background, and geographical origin of management body members.

This benchmarking exercise, conducted on a representative sample, includes data collection templates and will utilize the EBA’s data collection platform, EUCLID.

The EBA plans to analyze this diversity data and publish a benchmarking report at the Union level, including a country-by-country analysis every three years. It’s important to note that this data collection is not an annual exercise, as significant changes in the composition of management bodies are expected over a medium to long-term horizon, facilitated by appropriate measures within the institutions and investment firms.

The next step in this process involves the implementation of these Guidelines within the EBA’s reporting platform in EUCLID. The first data collection under these Guidelines is scheduled for 2025, with the reference date being 31 December 2024.