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The paper fills the gap of the scarce economic literature devoted to the investigation of systemic banks' prudential features. The statistical analysis gravitates around those banks designated by the Basel Committee of Banking Supervision as global systemically important banks (G-SIBs). It had been considered a comprehensive sample of 28 European systemic banks whose key financial indicators (capital adequacy, profitability, liquidity, and asset quality) became inputs for the peer analysis performed. The exploratory research consisted in performing a cluster analysis, to reveal if there is a pattern of similitude or, on the contrary, high heterogeneity between the different intrinsic financial characteristics of systemically important banks. The findings indicated a constant pattern of ressemblance between several G-SIBs, which persistently joined the same group for most years considered. From a temporal perspective, the year 2009 witnessed the highest dissimilarity and heterogeneity between European G-SIBs, a direct effect of the impact the financial turmoil had exerted on banks' balance sheets. By performing an in-depth, individual analysis of the financial features at the core of banks' grouping into homogenous clusters, a third conclusion arises. Several G-SIBs operating in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Netherlands and Germany seem to be the best performers as they depict a sound and profitable business model, for 2016-year end data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper aims at revealing where do European Union's contemporary banking industry stay within the global social and environmental responsibility stream. It is performed a comprehensive review and analysis of the main international frameworks and standards on environmental and societal responsibility, to which financial institutions can make a voluntary and public commitment. The spread of sustainability frameworks across EU countries has been suggestively, visually assessed, by drawing an EU's map for each international standard. The findings show that several countries comprise banks that adhered to all the main four frameworks, while others opted for only one framework. However, the countries distribution with respect to one sustainable standard or another is relatively balanced. From this aggregated, country-level picture the center of interest has shifted toward the individual financial profile of commercial banks that committed to becoming promoters of sustainability in the financial industry. For each sustainable bank it have been computed 9 key financial indicators, namely the market share, the liquidity position, the financial structure, the operational efficiency, profitability, capital adequacy and the individual contribution to the domestic financial depth. The raw values of these indicators, based on data available at 2013 year-end, as well as their descriptive statistics are meant to give an insight, comparatively, into the particularities of their business strategy, to show whether there are similarities across the sustainable banks' financial performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]