With less than a year until public business entities must begin complying with CECL, banks and credit unions have been fervently beginning transition efforts, and their preparations are taking center stage in regulatory and financial news. Important CECL news updates and potential changes to how institutions implement the accounting standard have come from the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) and their Transition Resource Group, bank and securities regulators, and proposals by industry associations.

With CECL comes change in the accounting for the allowance for loan and lease losses (ALLL) from an incurred loss model to an allowance for credit losses (ACL) using the current expected credit loss model. Because financial institutions will account for the loss allowance in a different way, and the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) modified the disclosure requirements, the typical ALLL disclosures in the financial report will need to be modified to cover CECL. This illustrates how disclosures will change and gives sample wording and tables.

We’ve been hearing it from all sides: CECL will have an institution-wide impact – greater, it is proposed, than any accounting change in banking history. Considering the breadth and depth of the impact, the transition to, implementation of, and ongoing execution of CECL demand oversight from the institution’s top executives, and in particular, the CFO.