The Monetary and Financial Statistics (MFS) is a new monthly publication which has replaced the Monetary Survey and the Money, Banking and other Financial Statistics, the last issues of which were published in December 2007.

In connection with the above new publication, the following should be noted: 

1. In May 2008, Table 8 of the MFS on commercial bank interest rates was discontinued and replaced by Tables 8 – 11 on Monetary Financial Institution interest rate statistics, which provide data harmonised with the European Central Bank’s legal requirements as from November 2007.  As from September 2009, statistics on  interest rates are shown in Tables 7-10.

2. The publication dates for each type of statistics broadly follow the release dates of the European Central Bank’s statistical calendars. The MFS publication for each reference month is released by the end of the following month, while the Monetary Financial Institutions (MFIs) interest rates data for each reference month are released with a lag of, approximately, ten days following the release of the MFS.

3.  With the entry into force of the “Definition of the Term “resident of Cyprus” for Statistical Purposes Directive of 2008” on 1 July 2008, all MFIs proceeded with the reclassification of a large number of enterprises without a physical presence in Cyprus (known as “Brass Plates”) from the “non-resident” to the “resident” sector.  As a result of the above change, a statistical break occurred in the reference month of July 2008.  For comparison and continuity purposes, two new tables were introduced in the MFS publication, namely Table 2.1 Deposits of domestic residents held with MFIs by institutional sector excluding companies without a physical presence and Table 5.1 MFI loans to domestic residents by institutional sector excluding companies without a physical presence, which excluded the impact of this reclassification from the MFI balance sheet statistics.  However, with the release of a new version of the MFS publication (see paragraph 4 below), these tables were discontinued, starting with the September 2009 issue.

4. In September 2009, the MFS publication was extensively revised and enriched with new statistical series and breakdowns for deposits and loans. Moreover, the ECB methodology concerning the calculation of annual growth rates has been implemented and data on transactions is published in Tables 1-6.3.  Details on the new methodology are provided in Part 4 of the “Technical Notes” in the MFS publication.

5. The data presented in the tables 1-6.3 of the MFS publication refer only to selected months. As from the November 2009 publication, a new feature was introduced, enabling the user to see all data available since November 2005. In order to see the full set of data, please press the button “Expand” on the top left corner of each table. Please press again the “Collapse” button to see the “reduced form” of the table.

Please note that when opening the monthly excel files you will get a security message, in case your excel macro security settings are set to “Medium”, and you will need to enable macros (please press "Enable Macros"). If your settings are set on “Very High” or “High”, you will need to set them to “Medium”. To do this, please open a blank excel workbook, select “Tools”, then “Options”, then “Security”, then “Macro Security” and finally click the “Medium” radio button. Please exit the excel application and open the monthly excel files again.

6.  From January 2010 onwards, the month appearing on the cover page of the MFS publication corresponds to the month in which the publication is released, rather than to the reference month of the last entry of data, as was the case up to the end of 2009.  As a consequence, the first publication of 2010, which includes data up to December 2009, will bear the issue date of “January 2010” instead of “December 2009”.