Your board skills matrix, live in your board portal

A board skills matrix maps each director's skills, knowledge and experience against what the board needs, so you can see the board's collective strengths, gaps and overlaps.

For banks and investment firms, it is a regulatory requirement. Under the Capital Requirements Directive (CRD) and the joint EBA and ESMA Guidelines on the suitability of members of the management body, institutions must assess both the individual and the collective suitability of their board. National supervisors, and the ECB for significant institutions, review this as part of their supervisory work.

Admincontrol Board Skills Matrix is built around the competence areas and methodology defined by the European Banking Authority (EBA), including the joint EBA and ESMA Guidelines on suitability assessment. The questionnaire comes pre-populated with the competence areas the EBA expects banks to evaluate, covering areas such as financial markets, regulatory frameworks, risk management, strategic planning and governance.

This means your bank doesn't need to build an assessment framework from scratch. The structure is already consistent with what supervisors expect to see, and the output, a timestamped, audit-ready PDF, is formatted to support regulatory submissions and governance reviews without additional manual work.

Individual suitability focuses on whether each director personally meets the fit and proper requirements: their qualifications, experience, reputation and absence of conflicts of interest. Collective suitability asks a broader question: does the board as a whole have the right mix of competencies to govern the bank effectively?

A board could be made up of individually qualified directors and still have significant collective gaps. For example, lacking sufficient expertise in credit risk, digital transformation or a specific geography. Regulators increasingly scrutinise collective suitability as a governance quality indicator, not just individual fitness. The Admincontrol Board Skills Matrix dashboard makes this distinction visible, showing both individual profiles and the aggregated collective picture in real time, so you can identify gaps and act on them before your next supervisory review.

At least once a year, and whenever board composition changes significantly: a director is appointed or leaves, a merger happens, or the bank's risk profile or business model changes materially.

The EBA and ESMA guidelines expect collective suitability to be maintained on an ongoing basis, not only checked at appointment. With the succession simulator, you can model a proposed appointment or departure before any decision is made. With one-click PDF reports, refreshing the matrix takes a few hours rather than weeks.