The MPS stock soars on the stock exchange after the words of the managing director Marco Morelli who, during the Sienese bank's meeting, announced that the board of directors is evaluating "perspectives of scenarios on dimensional aggregations or diversifications“. Obviously, the final choice will be up to the Ministry of the Economy, underlined the manager, the bank's main shareholder after the 2017 bailout.
Morelli's statements did not go unnoticed in Piazza Affari, where a veritable shower of purchases began: at 13 pm the stock gained 6,55% to 1,334 euros.
Returning to the assembly, the CEO wanted to praise the results obtained in 2018, a year in which “the bank got back on track. A machine has made a comeback which, above all from a commercial point of view, had in fact remained out of the market in recent years. Today it is a different bank in terms of size, numbers and activities” compared to the one that “shareholders saw and knew until mid-2017, but this brand returned to the market in 2018”.
Monte dei Paschi closed the year with a net operating profit of just over 300 million, but above all sold 29 billion Npl, reducing their percentage of total loans from 35,8% in 2017 to 16,4% at the end of the year. As regards 2019, Morelli invited shareholders to take into account "a macro picture at the beginning of the year much worse than that at the beginning of 2018", recalling the fact that the funding capacity for Monte dei Paschi in the Italian context is "more complicated and higher than last year”. The board of directors will also be busy this year evaluate a major overhaul of the business model "that reduces the cost of customer service and this means going to see if I can serve customers in a different way". Another strategic possibility is to use current or future partnerships with a view to cutting costs.
2019 is also the year in which the new and more stringent European rules (primarily mifid2) will come into force, which will oblige MPS to become "more selective" in lending "because we must safeguard the bank's capital position
The CEO then reiterated that Mps will go ahead with “the NPL reduction strategy and non-performing loans” as envisaged in the business plan. For 2019 on the UTPs "we have a goal of 2 billion, but we will try to do what we have done in the last two years, that is to achieve a better result".
Another important novelty concerns the Alexandria derivative. Mps is evaluating whether to challenge the 2015 settlement agreement with Nomura on the Alexandria derivative created by the previous management of the bank when it was led by Fabrizio Viola. However, the appeal is excluded for the contract with Deutsche Bank on Santorini.
The statute of limitations is not immediate in the transaction with Nomura and "investigations are still ongoing". For the Santorini affair "no profiles have emerged such as to justify - especially in relation to the hypothesis of contractual fraud evoked by some shareholders and taking into account the risks associated with such initiatives - the challenge of the aforementioned transaction
