The Bank of Italy is publishing a methodological note explaining how it reconstructed bank lending series back to January 2022 under the ATECO 2025 economic activity classification. The estimates address the statistical break created when banks switched to the new classification in January 2026, allowing users to distinguish reclassification effects from actual changes in lending.
The monthly national series cover loans to nonfinancial corporations and producer households resident in Italy, with estimated data for January 2022 through December 2025 and reported figures thereafter. Starting from banks' January 2026 balance sheet figures, the method works backward using changes in borrower exposures recorded in Analytical Credit Datasets (AnaCredit). Corrections account for AnaCredit's narrower coverage and ensure that reconstructed sector figures sum to the aggregate lending amounts already reported. The reconstruction does not extend to activity breakdowns in the bank's other statistical publications.
For December 2025, around 10% of AnaCredit borrowers fell into different activity groupings under the two classifications. Reclassification reduces construction's share of nonfinancial corporate lending from 7.9% to 7.4%, while increasing real estate's share from 7.8% to 8.4%. Without reconstruction, the transition would have produced statistical breaks of approximately EUR 3.5 billion in each of these sectors, in opposite directions, unrelated to actual credit movements.