What's in a Call Report

The call report keeps coming up in any conversation about bank financials. I realized I didn't really know what was in it. So I pulled one up.

The Name

The first thing I looked into was the name itself. It goes back to the 1800s. Regulators could "call" on a bank at any time to report its financial condition. The idea was straightforward. If a bank had to be ready to disclose its position on demand, it would stay more disciplined about managing its books. The formal name is the Report of Condition and Income, but everyone in banking just says "call report."

Today, every FDIC-insured bank files one quarterly with the FFIEC, the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council. The FFIEC coordinates among the federal banking regulators so that banks submit one standardized filing instead of separate reports to each agency.

The Structure

A call report isn't a single document. It's a collection of schedules, each covering a different slice of the bank's finances.

Schedule RC is the balance sheet, showing what the bank owns and owes at quarter-end. Schedule RI is the income statement, covering revenue and expenses for the period. Those two map directly to the standard financial statement framework. But the call report goes well beyond the standard financial statements.

There are schedules for loan breakdowns by type (Schedule RC-C), for past-due and nonperforming loans (Schedule RC-N), for deposit details (Schedule RC-E), for off-balance-sheet items (Schedule RC-L), and for regulatory capital calculations (Schedule RC-R). A community bank's full filing runs to dozens of pages.

The level of detail is granular. Regulators want to know exactly how much the bank holds in construction and land development loans, how much in 1-4 family residential mortgages, how much in commercial real estate. They want deposits broken down by account type and by whether they're insured or uninsured. The standardization is what makes it all useful. Every bank fills out the same schedules the same way, so any two institutions can be compared directly.

Finding the Data

The FFIEC publishes all call report data through the Central Data Repository. You can search by bank name, pull up any FDIC-insured institution, and view their filings quarter by quarter. The most recent available right now are the Q1 2022 filings.

Navigating the CDR takes some getting used to. Once you find a bank, you can view individual schedules or download the full report. Schedule RC and Schedule RI are the natural starting points, but clicking through the other schedules gives you a sense of how much data regulators are actually collecting.

Why It Matters

The call report is the source of truth for a bank's financial health. When examiners show up, this is what they're looking at. When the board reviews capital ratios, the numbers come from here. Understanding what's in the filing and how it's organized makes it possible to actually read the bank's numbers instead of just hearing about them secondhand.