Bank loan officers' informational needs and mandatory accounting information

Banks are supposed to respond to imperfect information in credit markets. They are thought to access private information and to create additional information through credit granting.This means two things. First, mandatory accounting information is not sufficient to create a state of perfect information. Second, because of their status of delegated monitors it could be interesting to identify the private information used by banks. In fact, this information could help to understand their superiority as monitors and their informational needs. This could be interesting for accounting standard setting.Based on interviews with bank loan officers, this study tries to identify what questions they attempt to answer while analysing and monitoring a credit file, what information they need and what are the problems with accounting information.We find that the analysis of borrower's risk relies heavily on bank private information and on bank shared information through Banque de France. But, bank loan officers look for more information, like risk indicators.The main problem with mandatory accounting information is its timeliness that does not allow an effective monitoring. Moreover, hardly gives it information about real cash and cash flows. So, supplementary non-accounting indicators are needed.Finally, our verbatim underline the need for cross validation by different information, including accounting information. This cross validation answers to several needs, one being justification.