After seeing contractions across all capital adequacy indicators in 2017’s soundness rankings, western European banks’ performance has seen a strong recovery this year. The region has posted a 15.1% increase in average Tier 1 capital and a 10.2% increase in total assets. This is especially good news for the global banking industry, as western Europe holds the largest amount of Tier 1 capital across the world.
However, despite the region’s average capital assets ratio (CAR) increasing from 5.26% to 5.49%, western European banks still lag their North American and Chinese counterparts, which have an average CAR of 7.97% and 7.09%, respectively.
