There are more ‘bad banks’ around than there used to be, with plenty of assets that need to be sold or run off. One of the more proactive bad banks sits inside Natixis, in the shape of its ring-fenced Gestion Active des Portfeuilles Cantonnés (GAPC) division. GAPC has been steadily disposing of ‘non-core’ assets, with help from an unorthodox Moelis & Co team that marries corporate finance skills with structured credit trading knowhow.
With significant exposure to structured credit, Paris-listed Natixis took a thrashing from the subprime crisis and its rescue triggered the merger of its two largest shareholders, the mutuals Banque Populaire and Caisse d’Epargne. BPCE, now France’s third largest banking group by Tier 1 capital, owns 72% of Natixis and guaranteed some €35bn of risk-weighted assets when GAPC was created in 2009. Under the direction of its head, Olivier Perquel, GAPC has reduced these (mostly structured and predominantly US) assets to “significantly” less than €10bn.
