These guidelines aim to achieve convergence of the practices followed by institutions for stress testing across the EU. They provide detailed guidance to be complied with by institutions when designing and conducting a stress testing programme/framework. The EBA issues these guidelines to update and replace the Committee of European Banking Supervisors (CEBS) Guidelines on stress testing (GL32), which will be repealed after the revised guidelines have entered into force.

These guidelines take into account the conclusions of the peer review of the implementation of GL32.

The guidelines establish and develop the following concepts: the taxonomy of stress testing; the description of types of stress test exercises; the reverse stress testing process for both regular stress testing and recovery planning purposes; and additional issues that have gained importance in the stress testing programme and need to be incorporated and properly defined, such as conduct-related risk and litigation costs, foreign exchange risk, interaction between solvency stress tests and liquidity stress tests, business models and data aggregation.