By N. Malliara
[email protected]
A total of 10 companies have received licenses by the Bank of Greece (BoG) to enter the domestic risk credit management sector, as efforts to reduce the Greek banking sector’s “mountain” of bad debts are expected to accelerate in the coming weeks.
A handful of other companies have submitted applications and are awaiting the BoG’s approval, including, according to reports, NM Advisors.
The ninth and tenth companies to receive the BoG license are Qquant Master Servicer and DV01 Asset Management.
They join Independent Portfolio Management, B2Kapital, UCI Hellas και Resolute Asset Management, Thea Artemis, Eurobank FPS, Cepal (Aktua Hellas) and PQH.
Efforts to shorten the time necessary to approve the license for debt management companies were obvious in the second half of the year, as institutional creditors continue to pressure Greece’s systemic lenders, the BoG and the leftist-rightist coalition government to reduce NPLs and NPEs in the country.
The “double-barrel” approach for 2018, by all accounts, is to fully resume weekly auctions of foreclosed real estate – preferably property with liens extending in the hundreds of thousands if not millions of euros – along with the sale of loan portfolios to distress funds.
Eurobank inaugurated the market for the latter last month, selling off a 1.5-billion-euro portfolio comprised mainly of non-performing consumer loans.
