4. IT Governance: Who Cares More? First Evidence from EU Banks and Supervisors

This chapter analyses IT governance disclosure for a sample of 12 EU banks (from Italy, Germany, France and Spain) to observe if, how and where banks report on their IT governance issues and to verify if after the crises, banks have started to pay more attention to IT governance. Since IT governance (like other aspects of banking business) can be influenced by the regulatory environment we examine whether any differences in Supervisors’ attitude to IT issues induce differences in IT governance across countries. Regarding IT governance transparency, as a key mechanism of corporate governance, we: i) outline an original IT governance framework; ii) perform a content analysis on banks public disclosure and a selected number of Supervisors’ official documents (2008–2015) to build up IT governance indices; and iii) run a multidimensional analysis to detect causal relationships between variables.