The data of banks, savings and cooperatives has been replaced for deposit taking institutions. As a result there have been changes in chapters 4,8 and 19

The integration plans for Spanish savings banks approved by the Banco de España within the framework of the savings bank restructuring process (see notice published on the Banco de España website on 29 June 2010) commenced in the closing months of 2010. Most of these processes have taken the form of operations to set up Institutional Protection Schemes (IPSs) and generally involve the creation of a commercial bank to which all or some of the assets and liabilities of the savings banks forming part of the IPS can be transferred. In some cases the mechanism used has been to transform savings banks into commercial banks. This financial phenomenon has influenced the behaviour of bank balance sheet items, which should not be analysed without taking into account the effect of these restructuring processes. Therefore this Boletín Estadístico recommends that commercial banks and savings banks be analysed jointly.

The significant quantitative transfer from the balance sheets of savings banks to those of commercial banks in May 2011 meant that the separation between commercial and savings banks in this Boletín Estadístico was no longer useful for analytical purposes. To make this presentation useful would require the addition of information to allow specific institutions to be identified. This, however, is not possible because legally the Banco de España may not disseminate this type of information. Henceforth, all figures relating to commercial banks and savings banks are replaced by data on the grouping “deposit-taking institutions”, which comprises commercial banks, savings banks and credit cooperatives.

Nevertheless, the mortgage market reference interest rates given in Chapter 19 of this Boletín Estadístico will continue to be disseminated in the same way as before.

In the above mentioned chapter, another change is introduced. Royal Decree 771/2011 of 3 June 2011 amending Royal Decree 2606/1996 of 20 December 1996 on deposit guarantee funds of credit institutions sets limits on the remuneration of deposits with agreed maturity of these institutions, above which they will have to increase their contributions to the respective guarantee fund.

The entry into force of this Royal Decree led to changes to the tables in section “A) legal interest rates” of this chapter. Specifically, Table “19.1 Legal interest rates, EURIBOR, MIBOR and other official mortgage market reference rates” has been split into two to make room for the publication of these new rates, and renamed “19.1 Legal interest rates, EURIBOR, MIBOR and other official reference rates”.