About us
PUMA Cooperation is a voluntary initiative of the banking and financial system, promoted and coordinated by the Statistical Data Collection and Processing Directorate of the Bank of Italy.
PUMA Cooperation was launched in 1974 and initially involved only Italian banks. Since the end of the 1990s, Italian financial intermediaries have also regularly participated in the initiative.
In 2018, the governance of PUMA Cooperation has been formalized by an agreement between the stakeholders. The agreement defines the governing bodies, the roles, the rules for participation and the objectives. In addition to the Bank of Italy, members include banks, financial intermediaries under Article 106 of the Consolidated Law on Banking (TUB) and trade associations.
The PUMA approach is based on the integrated production of several different statistical and supervisory reports.
The main objective of the initiative is to draft and maintain reference documentation for the production of information flows by intermediaries (e.g. banks’ supervisory reports, statistical and supervisory reporting by banking and financial intermediaries, Central Credit Register data, banks’ balance sheet items and explanatory notes to financial statements, etc.).
The PUMA documentation describes in formalized language the rules for the production of statistical information by banks and financial intermediaries. The development of special application packages is not part of the objectives of the initiative and is left to the market. Although the PUMA documentation is a key reference for the production of reports, its use is voluntary and intermediaries remain solely responsible for the accuracy of the reported data.
The availability of common rules ensures more uniform reporting by intermediaries and a better quality of the data reported to national and European authorities in terms of compliance with reporting regulations, accuracy, consistency and timeliness.
The PUMA Cooperation Functional Groups provide advice to the Bank of Italy’s Statistics Committee. This helps the Committee to make informed decisions and to assess the impact of new statistical information requirements and the costs for reporting agents.
The main PUMA products are:
- a common data dictionary and taxonomy;
- a relational (meta) database;
- a handbook with technical and functional definitions and explanatory notes.
Although the PUMA products are the result of analysis carried out by the PUMA cooperation members, they should be considered a ‘public good’ and as such are available to anyone who may want to use them.
The features and value of the PUMA project are fully described in the document ‘PUMA cooperation between the Bank of Italy and the intermediaries for the production of statistical, supervisory and resolution reporting’, published as issue no. 734 of the Bank of Italy’s series Questioni di Economia e Finanza (Occasional Papers).
Citazione Tommaso Padoa Schioppa (1993) su PUMA
This infrastructure is often considered simply as the IT application that produces statistics for the Bank of Italy (...). From the banks’ perspective, PUMA2 is, in fact, so much more. In order to generate those reports, it makes a selection from the archives of the banking company and builds a large database, which remains available to the company itself; (...) The main deliverable of PUMA2 is the creation of these databases, not the extraction of reports for the Bank of Italy. (...) Therefore, PUMA2 is also a tool that allows banks to benefit from the effort made to produce statistical and supervisory reports for the Bank of Italy.
Tommaso Padoa Schioppa (1993)
