More than a decade after the onset of the eurozone debt crisis, legacy non-performing exposures (NPEs) still cast a long shadow over parts of southern Europe. No banking sector has suffered more than Greece’s, and no lender’s non-performing loan battle has been bigger than Piraeus Bank — now known as Piraeus Financial Holdings.
By September 2015, the country’s second-largest lender had €37bn of bad debt and an NPE ratio of 55%. Its response, however, was commensurate to the challenge: “Piraeus started what was probably the biggest NPE clean-up of a bank of its size that has ever been done,” says Theodore Gnardellis, the group’s chief financial officer.
