Bulk files — Call.Report

The REST API is designed for per-institution queries. When you need a full quarter of Call Report filings or the daily structure of the banking industry, use the bulk download endpoints instead — the per-call API will not get you there at 2,500 requests per hour.

Call Report bulk ZIPs

The FFIEC CDR publishes one bulk ZIP per reporting period. Each ZIP contains every institution’s Call Report facsimile for that quarter.

Location: CDR Public Data Distribution, cdr.ffiec.gov/public/PWS/DownloadBulkData.aspx
Format: one ZIP per period, containing per-institution XBRL files and a single delimited FFIEC CDR Call Bulk All Schedules text file for tabular consumption.
Size: roughly 500MB per quarter.
Publication: preliminary data ~45 days after quarter end; continues to update for several months as institutions refile.

The bulk download is the right path for research spanning many institutions in a single period. The per-call REST API is the right path for following a small set of institutions over many periods, or for getting the latest amendments for a specific bank. ffiec-data-connect does not wrap the bulk ZIP download — use any HTTP client.

NIC daily attribute extracts

The Federal Reserve’s National Information Center (NIC) publishes daily ZIP extracts of structural data about every Fed-regulated entity.

Location: www.ffiec.gov/npw/FinancialReport/FinancialDataDownload
Format: ZIP of pipe-delimited text files. Schema documented in the same page’s supporting materials.
Contents: active attributes, closed attributes, branches, transformations (events), relationships (parent/sub links).
Cadence: daily.

Pull the “active attributes” file for a point-in-time snapshot of the industry; pull “transformations” to see what changed on a given day; pull “closed attributes” to reconstruct the last-known state of terminated entities.

FDIC bulk sources

The FDIC does not publish via FFIEC; it has its own distribution:

BankFind Suite / Institution Directory — CSV and API, keyed on FDIC CERT.
Summary of Deposits (SOD) — branch-level deposits, keyed on UNINUM, published annually as of June 30. www7.fdic.gov/sod/
Financial data — FDIC-computed quarterly figures, keyed on CERT. Overlaps Call Report data for insured depositories but with different field names and derivations.

FDIC numbers will often differ slightly from the same quarter’s Call Report. That isn’t a bug — the FDIC applies its own data-quality rules, and it aggregates differently for insured-subsidiary roll-ups.

OCC and state regulators

The OCC publishes lists of national banks and federal savings associations at occ.gov/topics/charters-and-licensing/index-charters-and-licensing.html. State regulators publish their own lists with no standardized format.

Practical pipeline

For a research pipeline that needs “every insured bank for every quarter”:

Attributes baseline. Pull the NIC daily extract once. This gives you the RSSD ↔ CERT ↔ OCC ID crosswalk and the entity lifecycle.
Quarterly Call Reports. For each period in scope, download the CDR bulk ZIP. Join to the NIC extract on RSSD.
UBPR. For peer-comparison research, download the UBPR bulk file (distinct from Call Report bulk) for each period. UBPR is keyed on RSSD.
Refiling monitor. For ongoing work, poll collect_filers_submission_date_time() per-period to detect new refilings and fetch just those via REST.