Financial reporting: performance and fair value. The case of the European banking sector

Regarding financial reporting, information about performances is one of the preferred items banking institutions are referring to. Therefore, quantitative and qualitative performance indicators are a significant part of annual reports. Reporting about performances raises some other issues: valuation at cost or at fair value, registration versus disclosure. In the case of the banking industry, the accounting information disclosed is all the more important as this sector is highly regulated. The regulation is based on management and structure ratios whose intended effects are the prevention of bank failures, as informational asymmetry between depositors, banks and borrowers can cause economic panics. Within the framework of international accounting standards, fair value is more and more referred to as a mean of valuation in the process of determining the economic income. Furthermore, the international accounting regulation institutions tend to promote comparable performance indicators while maintaining the quality of the disclosures about segments of an enterprise. Nevertheless, except the standards dealing with earnings per share and segment reporting, of all the present standards of the iasb, none is specifying the contents and the form of the information about performances. The adoption of ias 32 and ias 39 by the banking institutions which decided to use in advance the ias framework from january 1st, shows the growing importance of fair value in financial statements. The information strategy aimed at the investors which is developed by a lot of european banking institutions consists in the disclosure of voluntary information such as the determination of the income by the way of fair value. The purpose of this paper is the presentation of the characteristics of this voluntary information. Studying a sample of twenty european banking institutions, we developed an exploratory research. This research is based on a contents analysis of the voluntary information disclosed (frequency tests). The most representative factors of the informational structure are settled by means of a factor analysis.ou