The Single Resolution Board (SRB) has sent a powerful signal to Europe’s banking sector with the release of its Operational Guidance on Banks’ Communication (October 2025), signalling that reputation and social media are now material to financial stability.
This latest update to the SRB’s expectations for banks under the EU’s single resolution mechanism makes clear that managing online conversations is no longer a communications afterthought, but a regulatory expectation. The guidance places renewed emphasis on how institutions monitor and respond to fast-moving reputational risks, particularly those emerging on social and digital platforms.
The reasoning is hard to ignore. In a digital financial system where news and gossip travel at light speed, confidence can evaporate in hours and bank runs can start in seconds. The message to banks is unmistakable: reputational vigilance is now as critical as capital and liquidity management.
Recent banking crises, particularly the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank three years ago, have made regulators increasingly concerned that the combination of digital payment systems and unrestrained social media has created new channels for bank runs and potential collapses. The FSB’s 2024 global review of deposit runs found that “social media had an influence on some of the recent bank runs,” with the failure of Silicon Valley Bank preceded by “a large spike of communication about the bank on Twitter/X,” showing that digital information flows can accelerate deposit runs at unprecedented speed - something the SRB describes as a “compressed runway leading to resolution”.
Depositors can now move their money almost instantly with a swipe on their smartphones. Therefore, they no longer need to queue outside branches, as famously seen during previous crises such as the collapse of Northern Rock in the UK. Combine this speed with the unpredictability of today’s information environment - where a false post, leaked document or sensational thread can go viral in minutes - and the risk becomes clear.
As Paul Krugman put it, banking crises are not about insolvency; they are about fear. If a rumour damages a bank’s reputation, whether or not it’s true, customers can empty their accounts in seconds from home out of fear or perception alone. This means that, unless a bank is actively monitoring and managing its reputation in real time, a crisis can unfold and escalate before the institution itself can even react.
Regulators have been thinking a great deal about this recently. The FSB’s study on depositor behaviour suggested that banks and authorities should consider whether there was a need to monitor social media as an early warning tool. Now the SRB has come out with the explicit expectation that banks actively manage their “informational environment”. There is no ambiguity here. Banks should be continuously tracking both traditional and non-traditional media, identifying misinformation, and responding with credible, evidence-based messages. Supervisors will be assessing these capabilities as part of their reviews and a bank that cannot demonstrate that it is able to detect and counter false narratives in real time could end up incurring the wrath of their regulator.
Meeting these expectations requires more than a set of templates or a crisis communications plan gathering dust on the shelf. Both the SRB and FSB have made clear that banks must demonstrate active, continuous, and technologically capable communication management as a component of their operational resilience.
Therefore, banks must monitor social and digital channels continuously, with systems capable of detecting emerging sentiment shifts and misinformation before they spill into markets. The SRB guidance explicitly calls for governance arrangements and tools “to monitor traditional and non-traditional media channels,” including social media, and to be ready to respond rapidly to misinformation or leaks with key stakeholders.
These are high operational standards and they demand the right data, technology, and analytical insight.
At Penta, we help financial institutions meet precisely these kinds of challenges. Our proprietary media and reputation intelligence platform tracks mainstream, digital, and social media in real time, identifying early indicators of sentiment change, misinformation, and reputational risk. By combining advanced analytics with expert interpretation, we give financial institutions early warning of potential crises. This is not just a stream of information, but early warnings and insights to act decisively and credibly.
For institutions under the SRB’s remit, this capability provides not only operational resilience but also demonstrable evidence of compliance with supervisory expectations. It shows that the bank understands and manages the reputational dimension of resolvability proactively, continuously and effectively.
The SRB’s new guidance confirms what we already knew to be true: communication risk is no longer a PR issue, it’s a supervisory one. Banks that take it seriously and invest in the tools to manage it will be better prepared for both crises and scrutiny.