Npl, where are we? On the day when all the attention of the markets and of the press were addressed to Def launched by the Government, which widens the deficit/GDP to 2,4%, saying goodbye to the reduction of the public debt and cashing in on the highly probable rejection by Brussels, at Venice Lido Banca IFIS organized the week's edition of the Npl Meeting. The one for which the managing director of the Venetian bank, Giovanni Bossi, has also suggested a new way to read the acronym that we all know dissolve in "non performing loans". Non-performing loans, non-performing loans, to say it in Italian. But Bossi is already moving on to the next step, the "next performing level", the next step is that of disposing of that huge mass of loans, which today weigh less on the balance sheets of Italian banks but which continue to exist.
"Only 5 billion have so far been recovered - Bossi said, rattling off some numbers -, out of the total of 252 billion bad loans calculated in Italy in July 2018, which are the sum of the 127 billion gross Npl still borne by the banks and the 130 billion , always gross, already sold in recent years”. At the end of the year, according to the estimates of the Banca IFIS NPL Market Watch, the gross non-performing loans still held by Italian banks will be 105 billion, practically half of the 200 billion of 2015. Translated into net terms, they will be 35 against 90 three years ago, and will continue to occupy about half of the balance sheets of credit institutions, against 31% in 2010, before the non-performing credit crisis exploded.
However, this does not mean that the NPLs are absorbed: the figure remains that of 5 billion, but the others are sold to other financial entities, lightening the weight on the banks' balance sheets. "In 2018, according to our estimates, 83 billion Npl will be transacted - says Bossi - 17% more than in 2017". A generous estimate, reduced during the proceedings by the intervention of Paolo Corradino, deputy director of ECB supervision, who first limited the figure to 65 billion according to Frankfurt estimates, and then announced an internal debate at the Eurotower on a possible regulatory distinction between non-performing loans, i.e. non-performing loans, the "terminal" stage of the debt, and UTPs (unlikely to pay), i.e. the so-called problem loans, considered "a transitional category".
In any case, more than half of the total mass of NPLs, 53% of those 252 billion, i.e. 191 billion, was transacted over the years by only 6 subjects and Banca IFIS is among these, together with DoBank, Cerved, Prelios, Tersia and Sga, bearing witness to a polarized albeit heterogeneous market, given that, as Bossi points out, "these are loans of various origins, qualitatively very different from those of the crisis Spain of 2011, when they were all linked to real estate loans".
This is why the care that is needed “must also be artisanal, skills and specialties are needed. But systemic risk, in my opinion, we have left behind”, says the director of the bank founded in 1983 by Sebastien Egon Fürstenberg and specialized in factoring. But how long will it take to recover all the NPLs, if only 5 billion euros have been recovered in a few years? A difficult prophecy to make, even for an optimistic banker like Bossi, e then the Venetian guest of honor, the economist Luigi Zingales, takes care of it: “It will take no less than 20 years. Just look at the example of the Banco di Napoli: almost everything has been recovered, but it took 20 years”.
