Cross-border banking exposure: methodology

The /crossborder module reads two Bank for International Settlements datasets that measure international banking exposure in two genuinely different ways. Getting the two straight is the whole point of this page, so start here.

Two datasets, two lenses

Locational Banking Statistics (LBS), the residence basis. LBS records the positions of banks by the country where the reporting bank office is located, regardless of who owns the bank. A US-owned bank booking a loan through its London branch counts under the United Kingdom, not the United States. LBS is built to measure the geography of financial intermediation and capital flows, and it reports both claims (assets: lending, holdings) and liabilities (funding: deposits, borrowing). FinWeave uses the cross-border position type: positions between a bank in one country and a counterparty in another.

Consolidated Banking Statistics (CBS), the nationality basis. CBS records the worldwide-consolidated claims of banks by the country where the parent bank is headquartered, netting out positions between offices of the same banking group. The same US-owned bank's London book counts under the United States. CBS is built to measure country-risk exposure: how much a national banking system, as a group, is exposed to a given borrower country. CBS reports claims only; by design it has no liabilities measure.

They are not additive and not directly comparable. LBS and CBS overlap but measure different things over different reporting panels. This page never sums an LBS figure and a CBS figure, and never presents one as a check on the other. Where both appear for a country, they are two separate readings.

Units

Every figure in both datasets is an amount outstanding (a stock, not a flow) in millions of US dollars in the raw parquet (BIS UNIT_MULT = 6, "Millions", constant across every row of both files). The page displays these as $B (billions) and $T (trillions) for readability; the underlying values are millions. Country claims timelines are drawn in USD billions for most countries and USD trillions for the very largest, always labelled on the chart.

Exact selections (the dimension cut)

BIS publishes both datasets across many dimensions. This module keeps a fixed "core cut" and lets only a few dimensions vary. Both cuts were verified against BIS's live SDMX API before being applied, which caught two silent traps documented in data/raw/bis_lbs/SOURCE.md (the L_POSITION=D code and the L_POSITION=S/CBS_BANK_TYPE=4M codes all carry zero rows).

LBS core cut

So on /crossborder the LBS free dimensions are: measure (claims or liabilities), reporter, counterparty, and quarter. There is no currency, instrument, maturity, or counterparty-sector breakdown in this cut: those dimensions are collapsed to their "all" totals, and the page does not imply otherwise.

CBS core cut

CBS free dimensions: reporter (bank nationality), counterparty, and quarter. There is no maturity, sector, or ultimate-risk-basis breakdown in this cut, and no liabilities measure exists.

What each view shows

• Total cross-border claims timeline. LBS claims, all reporting countries (5A) versus all countries (5J), quarterly 1977-Q4 to the latest quarter. The 5A reporter aggregate reconciles exactly with the sum over individual reporters (verified). The Global Financial Crisis peak and trough are computed from the series, not asserted.
• Largest reporter banking systems. LBS claims by individual reporting country versus all counterparties (5J), latest quarter. This ranks where lending is booked, so financial centres rank high.
• Largest counterparty countries. LBS claims by all reporters (5A) versus individual counterparty, latest quarter. The sum over individual counterparties is slightly below the 5J total because 5J also carries unallocated and international-organisation counterparties.
• Claims on emerging markets. LBS claims by all reporters versus the BIS emerging-market aggregate (4T) and its regional sub-aggregates (4Y, 4W, 4U). These are BIS's own country groupings, not sums computed here; the three regions do not add up to 4T (emerging Europe and unallocated emerging positions are the remainder).
• Per-country funding view (/crossborder/[iso3]). For each counterparty country: LBS claims on it (all reporters), the change since the 2019-Q4 baseline, LBS liabilities to it, CBS international claims on it, the full claims history, and the CBS breakdown by bank nationality where the panel carries it.

Coverage and panel caveats (name the caveat)

• The reporting population changes over time. The set of jurisdictions that report to BIS has grown since 1977 (LBS) and 1983 (CBS). Part of the long-run rise in total cross-border claims reflects more reporters joining the panel, not only more lending by a fixed group. Comparisons across long spans mix a growth-of-coverage effect with a growth-of-activity effect. BIS flags methodology-driven discontinuities with a "break" status; those observations carry a real number but are not comparable to the prior quarter.
• LBS reports 48 jurisdictions; CBS reports 31. Several LBS-only jurisdictions (mostly offshore and financial centres) do not separately publish consolidated statistics, so the CBS panel is narrower. This is why a country can have LBS claims but thin or absent CBS nationality detail.
• Confidential suppression. BIS suppresses individual cells that would disclose a single reporter's confidential position. Suppressed observations are not in this cut. Where a country's CBS nationality breakdown is empty, the page says so rather than inferring a value.
• Bangladesh and other non-reporters appear only as counterparties. Bangladesh does not report to BIS LBS or CBS, so it never appears as a reporting country, only as a counterparty other banks lend to. This is expected, not a gap.
• Aggregates are BIS's own. 5A, 5J, 4T, 5R, 4U, 4W, 4Y are BIS country groupings carried in the data, not aggregates computed by FinWeave. Historical/defunct area codes (USSR, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and similar) appear in the deep history with no ISO3 code and are excluded from the country pages.

Citation and license

Source: Bank for International Settlements, BIS Data Portal (data.bis.org), datasets WS_LBS_D_PUB (Locational Banking Statistics) and WS_CBS_PUB (Consolidated Banking Statistics); downloaded 2026-07-10. BIS statistics may be used, reproduced, and distributed free of charge provided the source is cited ("Source: BIS"). Do not imply BIS endorsement. Full terms: https://www.bis.org/terms_conditions.htm.

Full provenance, the row-count reconciliation, the live-API verification of the cut, and the spot-checks are in data/raw/bis_lbs/SOURCE.md and docs/data_provenance.md.