Healthy outlook for Piraeus Bank after slashing bad loans

Piraeus Bank reported a significant drop in its exposure to bad loans on Friday.

“Our reduction plan for nonperforming exposures is well on track, with more than 90% of actions already executed. NPE reduction in the first nine months of the year amounted to 16 billion euros, bringing our NPE ratio down to 16%,” Chief Executive Christos Megalou said.

The NPE reduction helped Piraeus Bank to announce a smaller loss in the third quarter than the previous three months.

The bank reported a net loss from continued operations of €635 million, down from €2.045 billion in the second quarter, as loan impairment provisions slumped to €811 million from €2.28 billion.

The bank announced that in the first nine months of 2021 it had granted €4.6 billion in new financing, in line with its target of €5.7 billion for the whole year.

During the same period, customer deposits and mutual funds increased by €3.4 billion.

Megalou hit an optimistic note about the future of Piraeus, saying that the bank’s transformation is producing tangible results in record time.

“Performance has been strong on all fronts with solid revenue generation, continued cost discipline, and a massive improvement in organic loan impairments.”

He added that Piraeus is launching new initiatives, “with the aim of capturing business upside, by leveraging on increasing healthy credit demand and Recovery and Resilience Facility structural funds, enhancing our asset management, bancassurance and custody business, as well as exploiting digital ecosystem commercial opportunities.” [Reuters]