National Bank of Georgia takes up a new statistical initiative. This is an International Monetary Fund project on Financial Soundness Indicators, which will support the people interested with the Georgian economy and financial sector in making the right economic decisions.

1990’s financial crises significantly motivated International Monetary Fund to launch a project on Financial Soundness Indicators.  Then existing information gap hindered the effective assessment of financial sector soundness. In order to eliminate or narrow this gap International Monetary Fund (IMF) developed Financial Soundness Indicators (FSIs). FSIs are indicators of the current financial health and soundness of the financial sector of financial institutions in a country, and of the sectors of their corporate and household clients. FSIs include indicators of consolidated individual institution data and indicators about the markets in which the financial institutions operate. In addition to this, IMF developed specific FSI methodology which results in the cross-country comparable data.

FSIs comprise of the core (12) and encouraged (28) sets of indicators. The project member countries disseminate FSIs with the certain frequency basis. As for today about 70 countries report FSIs to IMF, which by itself disseminates the data on the web-site.  FSIs are one of the inputs that go into macro prudential analysis. They serve for observation and assessment of financial system strength and soundness, and for probability minimization of financial system collapse as well.

After invitation on participation in the project from IMF in 2010, National Bank of Georgia went through mass of preparatory works, which include compiling, analyzing and systematization of financial indicators (with metadata) of financial sector according to international standards. The successful working process on FSIs by statistics division of NBG implies the introduction of advanced methods and approaches, particularly increasing the coordination not only among NBG divisions but also with the National Statistics Office of Georgia, in terms of conducting combined surveys.

From April, 2012 Georgia quarterly disseminates Financial Soundness Indicators on IMF website (Financial Indicators - http://elibrary-data.imf.org/Report.aspx?Report=4160268, Metadata -  http://fsi.imf.org/CountryList.aspx).It should be mentioned that, Georgia is already a full member of international statistical initiatives: Special Data Dissemination Standard (Since May 2010, alongside with Geostat and Ministry of Finance; http://dsbb.imf.org/Pages/SDDS/CtyCtgList.aspx?ctycode=GEO) and International Reservesand Foreign Currency Liquidity (Since April, 2010; http://www.imf.org/external/np/sta/ir/IRProcessWeb/data/geo/eng/curgeo.htm)