Originality/value – Despite the economic importance of the banking industry, accounting researchers have done little to investigate the various relationships that exist between banks and their auditors. Furthermore, most studies focus on the US market and examine the pricing of audit services for financial institutions, the audit opinions on publicly-traded savings and loans institutions that subsequently failed, the effectiveness of bank audit, the loss under reporting and the auditor role of examination of banks, the impact of accounting and auditing systems on risk-shifting of safety nets in banking. The present paper extends the literature by investigating the determinants of external auditors’ opinion on Asian bank