MILANO – The quality of credit in the belly of Italian banks remains one of the main questions about the recovery, in particular after a Covid crisis which was characterized by the anomaly of seeing the Gross Domestic Product collapse dramatically (almost 9 points) while the disbursements of funding continued to flow, thanks to the government’s emergency support measures. What will happen now to those loans that have gone to companies often exposed to economies upset by lockdowns?
Difficult loans growing, but below the levels of previous crises
According to the Banca Ifis NPL Market Watch data presented on Friday, there is no need to worry too much. For the institution specializing in the management of impaired loans, Covid will not lead to a ‘tsunami’ in the world of credit and banks thanks to the PNRR in part but also thanks to a new ability to cooperate between banks, servicing operators and institutions. The crisis among companies exists and will emerge in the numbers of the coming months but the anti-crisis measures have contained the impact of NPLs and the servicing industry has made itself ready by investing in skills and technologies: the flow of non-performing loans is lower to the volumes of the previous crises, 2008 and 2015, but also lower than the forecasts of 2020. “The government and the institutions have taken extraordinarily effective measures in ferrying the country out of the economic crisis. Today we are able to absorb non-performing loans effectively and efficiency and to be protagonists of the recovery “- what was said by the CEO of Banca Ifis, Frederik Geertman, at the tenth edition of the Npl Meeting in Villa Erba.
According to IFIS estimates, the new flows of impaired credit, equal to 41 billion in 2022 and 32 billion in 2023, will in any case be lower than the 71 billion recorded in 2013 alone, both in absolute value and in percentage terms. The total of impaired exposures (classified as NPLs or Utps, indicating different degrees of difficulty in recovering the money) at the end of 2021 should amount to 345 billion euros in Italy, of which 90 billion still on the bank books and the rest sold to operators of the sectors that play an important role in the stability of the financial system. The stock in 2023 should reach 430 billion euros, of which only a quarter weighs on bank balance sheets. According to the report’s estimates, Italy will reach in 2021 an NPE ratio (ratio of impaired loans to total loans) of just under 5% which will grow slightly to 5.9% in 2023. This “will allow banks to deal with financing and the real economy “. The vision is common and public, private and institutions form a system: “this is very encouraging – the CEO of Banca Ifis sums up – If things go even differently from what we have foreseen, there will still be a system that will be able to adapt, every operator in his own role by collaborating with each other “.
Where are the sufferings: “Few great subjects”
Said of the general flows, where are the main problems of difficulty in repaying the loans located? In this case, the “Map of bank bad debts” created by Fabi, which photographs the situation as of last March, comes to the rescue. It emerges that it is the industrial groups and large companies that weigh, with unpaid loans, on the balance sheets of Italian banks, but small debtors (families, VAT numbers, small and medium-sized enterprises) have had greater difficulties, in the year of Covid. , to pay the loan installments. Compared to March 2020, about half of the bank non-performing loans, out of a total of almost 50 billion euros, refer to loans for a significant amount, over 1 million euros. This is, to be exact, 23.8 billion, equal to 49.96% of the total 47.6 billion, attributable to 11,989 subjects (families and businesses) which correspond only to 2.36% of the galaxy of institutional customers. credit affected by the phenomenon of unpaid installments. And just 126 subjects hold 2.9 billion in impaired loans relating to loans over 25 million euros: therefore, 0.02% of customers account for 6.12% of bad loans.
Few subjects, therefore, who, in the audience of over half a million “bad payers” in the credit industry, have a significant impact on the bad debts of the banking sector. The percentage rises, if we take into account loans from 500,000 euros upwards: 4.39% of customers are “responsible” for 60% of the unpaid installments, which means that 22,290 subjects correspond to over 28 billion in bad debts.
“Banks focus heavily on the sale of financial products and little on loans. An activity, the latter, which is still closely linked to the personal relationships of bankers with businesses. In short, there is still a lot of relational credit, loans to friends. of friends – says the secretary of Fabi, Lando Maria Sileoni – Precisely because of this type of behavior, the bad debts of the banks, that is, the loans not repaid, are produced by very few, large subjects. mortgages or consumer credit, to put the banks in difficulty, but they are 126 large subjects that weigh heavily on banks’ balance sheets “.
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