The European Central Bank will reveal more detail on Monday on how it plans to go about checking that top euro zonebanks have the risks on their balance sheets under control.
The ECB's asset quality review, or AQR, is part of a broader examination that also includes a stress test to see how banks hold up under shock scenarios, to avoid nasty surprises once the ECB takes up responsibility for supervising them from November.
It aims to encourage banks to recognise losses on loans or investments that have soured over time, allowing them to regain investors' trust and free up capacity to grant new loans to help along the euro zone's fragile economic recovery.
"The devil will be in the detail and the risks of lowest common denominator and compromise in such a multilateral process are legion," said Morgan Stanley's Huw van Steenis.
"This is why the market still has many doubts on how cathartic a process the AQR and stress tests will be."
The ECB will address at least some of such doubts on Monday by laying out, for example, how it will define when a loan has turned bad and what the next steps will be.
On Friday, the European Banking Authority (EBA) set out key parameters for the stress tests it coordinates, which imply that the probe will be tougher than previous ones.
The two reviews will eventually feed into each other and their timings will overlap somewhat, but the overall result -spelling out the size of any capital shortfall - will only be published in October.
Analysts have estimated the tests will show the banks need up to 100 billion euros of fresh capital.
