By George Georgiopoulos

ATHENS, Reuters -The third quarter loss at Piraeus Bank (one of the four largest lenders in Greece) was lower than expected due to lower provisions for bad loans.

After reporting a net loss in continued operations of 635 millions euros (721 million), the bank’s second quarter results were 2.045 trillion euros. Loan impairment provisions dropped to 811million euros, from 2.28billion.

Analyst projections ranged between a loss of 630 millions euros and 800 million.

The plan to reduce NPE is on the right track, with over 90% of all actions completed. Christos Megalou, Chief Executive of Christos Megalou stated that NPEs were reduced by 16 billion euros in the first nine month. This brings our NPE ratio to 16%.

The bank had a higher return on tangible equity than 5%. He also stated that the NPE ratio would be single-digit in the “coming period.”

Piraeus Bank had a stock of NPE exposures of 5.9 billion euro at September’s end, down from 22.5 million euros at 2020. Its NPE ratio increased to 16%, from 23% at June and 46% six-months ago.

The bank stated that the impairments in the 3rd quarter resulted from losses incurred by the “Sunrise 2”, and leasing portfolio NPEs bad loan securitizations. These were then classified as being held-for-sale during the 3rd quarter.

As the bank took on more bad loans, net interest income dropped 22% to 319million euros. But, net fee and Commission income increased by 1%, to 102million, due to its assets management, investment banking and funds transfer businesses.

Bank said that deposit costs were supportive and the growth in performing loan balances would, as expected, also with RRF Funds (Recovery and Resiliency Facilities) funds, generate loan interest income.