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Bper, new Gacs for 1.8 billion

15 December, Milano Finanza

2018 will be the year of deleveraging for Bper Banca. The Modena-based group guided by Alessandro Vandelli, in fact, is intending to address the issue of the bad loans stock currently present in its financial statement just while the new addendum by the ECB is about to become effective. In these last few weeks of the year, the bank has started the works for the securitisation of a portfolio of approximately 1.8 billion euro of nominal value. An important operation that will go live in January and will conclude at the end of 2018 or in the first quarter of 2019 at latest. The State guarantee (Gacs) will be requested for the operation for the senior tranche.

The transfer will join that for 1.1 billion launched last month for a portfolio of the subsidiary Banco di Sardegna that involved Banca Imi as the arranger, Prelios as the servicer, and the firms Orrick and Rcc as legal consultants. This operation should conclude by the first part of 2018, considered that the fulfilment of the business plan is expected by February. “The document”, explained Vandelli to Milano Finanza, “will be then submitted to the rating agencies, a necessary condition to obtain the State guarantee on the senior tranche”. After all, the transfer of bad loans is at the centre of the Bper’s strategy to reduce its stock of gross bad loans currently amounting to 4 billion by 2020. “During a recent roadshow in Europe and in the United States, we’ve received positive feedback from the investors regarding our strategy”, stresses Vandelli. The strategy, however, doesn’t include only transfers since the bank is intending to aim also at the management of portfolio. “At the beginning of 2016”, explains the Ceo, “We’ve constituted an ad hoc company to monitor these projects, named Bper Credit Management. At the end of the second year, the credit collection activity is assessed to grow by 30-40% compared to 2016 thanks to our asset management strategy. There are other two factors that is important to mention: the default rate, namely the index measuring the passage from performing to non-performing, which has gone from 7% to 2% in the past few years, and the cure rate (that measures the return to performing) that is set at 10%, definitely a satisfying result for the bank”.

For what concerns capital, the manager is not particularly worried by the evolutions of the regulation, which he’s carefully monitoring. Concerning the review of the internal based approach, “last year we were the first Italian bank with internal models validated directly by the ECB, a very cautious and strict validation process, complying with the Eba guidelines that were published shortly after”. Finally, concludes Vandelli, “one more reason to not worry is the fact that this year, we haven’t been involved in the review of models by Ssm, the so-called Trim, while in 2018 we’ll be only marginally involved”.

Source: Milano Finanza

Translator: Cristina Ambrosi