Five years after the beginning of the financial crisis the world is still witnessing bailouts and bank failures on a regular basis. Since then an unknown number of European banks have collapsed under the weight over plummeting housing markets, financial mismanagement and other reasons. But how many European banks did actually crash during the crisis?

In October 2012 Open Economics therefore organised a data sprint to track basic information on banking failures in EU member states since 2007. At the moment more than 125 bank failures has been added to the Failed Bank Tracker. Take a look at the data and add failed banks you consider to be missing.

Below follows some information on the columns we use in the tracker:

• Name of bank:
• City, Country of operation:
• Home country: Location of their main operation
• Date of collapse (US date):
• Source (re: date of bank failure):
• Total asset of balance sheet bank at failure (EUR + orig. currency)
• Source (link for total asset of balance sheet):
• Corporate entity: In case the bank is owned by another entity
• Acquirer: This can be government (ie. NAMA Ireland or FROB Spain) or private if another bank takes control
• Failed: Yes/No
• Type of restructuring: Administration, nationalisation and restructering are most common entries
• Source: Link to government statement (ie. gazette) or to credible news source (ie. FT, Bloomberg, Reuters)
• Amount: The size of the capital provided by the government in relation to the bank failure.
• Did the bank receive state aid?

Questions on geographical and historical scope

Initially focus has been on post-2007 bank failures. However we are attempting to expand the period and already hold data on bank failures with more historical data. In terms of geographical coverage, the data set currently only holds European countries. However additional countries could easily be added to the list. So get in touch if you wish to add bank failures from your country.