ROME: The market for non-performing loans is growing and is slowly establishing itself, Nicola Rossi, president of Banca Popolare di Milano (BPM), told CNBC in Italy on Saturday. Italian policymakers and European Union (EU) officials have been pondering how to improve Italy’s fragile banking system in recent months, which has been bogged down by non-performing loans estimated to total around 360 billion euros ($401 billion).
“Now things are getting slowly better and it takes time,” BPM’s Rossi told CNBC on the sidelines of the Ambrosetti forum on economics. “It is not a matter of injecting public money to solve the problem, sometimes legal procedures can do much more to solve the problem,” he added.
BPM, the third-largest bank in Italy by assets, recently posted a small rise in net profits for the first six months of the year. However, shares of BPM have been on a sharp downward run since mid-2015, knocked by fears regarding the large pile of toxic loans in the Italian bank sector.
