Fourthly, the efforts that have been made to collect more granular data from banks and other agents take into account the reporting burden. The idea is that granular data are stepwise only reported once and are used for several purposes. The reporting burden on the reporting agents is thereby reduced, saving resources and costs.
Timely granular data are also key to addressing in a smooth and effective manner ever-changing user needs, and also to reducing the need for costly ad hoc data requests. In any case, all data collections by the ESCB are subject to a prior, strict merits-and-costs procedure in order to minimise the reporting burden, subject to statistical needs.