Madrid: Bank resolution communication has moved from an afterthought to a supervised capability, after the Single Resolution Board published operational guidance on 17 September 2026 telling the largest lenders in the Banking Union how they are expected to speak to markets, staff and depositors on the weekend they fail. The package pairs the Operational Guidance for Banks on Communication in Resolution with a Communication Testing Supplement to the Board’s existing guidance on resolvability testing, and it gives banks under the SRB’s direct remit until April 2028 to reflect the expectations in their communication plans.
The Board is careful to say that nothing in the text creates a new legal obligation. What it does is put operational flesh on the sixth of the seven dimensions in its Expectations for Banks, the framework that sets out the capabilities a bank must build to be considered resolvable. Article 8(9)(n) of the Single Resolution Mechanism Regulation already requires a communication plan to be prepared as part of resolution planning, and the European Banking Authority’s guidelines on improving resolvability treat communication as a key area. The new guidance is presented as fully aligned with that EBA framework, which matters for groups that deal with several resolution authorities at once.
Anyone who remembers the collapse of Banco Popular in June 2017 will understand why the SRB cares about bank resolution communication. The Spanish lender was sold overnight for a symbolic euro, and the speed of that operation depended on a narrative that reassured depositors while shareholders and junior creditors absorbed the losses. The 2023 turmoil that swept through regional American banks and ended with the rescue of Credit Suisse reinforced the lesson that confidence can drain through a phone screen faster than any liquidity buffer can be mobilised. A bank that cannot explain within hours what resolution means for customers risks turning an orderly process into a run.
The testing supplement is the more demanding half of the package, because it turns bank resolution communication into something that can be measured. It defines testing areas and sub-areas, sets out the methods banks can use, and describes what the SRB expects on governance, design, preparation and reporting of communication tests. In practice this means dry runs of the announcements, stakeholder lists, approval chains and channels that a bank would activate over a resolution weekend, run as part of the multi-annual testing programme that the Board has been rolling out since it consulted on resolvability testing in spring 2025.
SRB Chair Dominique Laboureix framed the text as help rather than a new burden, stressing that banks remain responsible for communicating with their own stakeholders in a crisis. The documents follow a public consultation held between 17 October and 12 December 2025, and a feedback statement published alongside them explains how industry comments were handled.
The timing fits a broader shift in the Board’s work. Its annual resolvability assessment, released on 31 July, put operational readiness and testing at the centre of the next phase, in line with the SRM Vision 2028 strategy. For compliance teams in Madrid, Paris or Milan, the practical message is that bank resolution communication will now be examined in the same way as bail-in data or valuation capabilities, through evidence that a plan works rather than a document that says it exists. The 2028 horizon looks generous, but banks that have never rehearsed a resolution announcement will find that designing credible tests, and fixing what they reveal, takes more than one planning cycle.
