Prelios Group CEO Riccardo Serrini interviewed by Irene Elisei for Class CNBC at the open day on 28 January 2020 celebrating the first 20 years of the Class Group broadcaster. The non-stop twelve-hour live broadcast looked back at 20 years in finance and business together with key figures from the corporate world. With Serrini, the event was an opportunity to review the situation of the distressed loans market and the economy in general, and to talk about new technologies in finance, a phenomenon with the power to change the business models of the entire sector.
"The distressed loans market is far more structured today than it used to be,” said the Prelios Group CEO during the interview. “A sizeable portion of assets has been transferred from the banking system to investors, largely through public securitization transactions backed by the GACS guarantee.” As far as UTPs are concerned, Riccardo Serrini believes that “unlike NPLs, Unlikely to Pay loans affect the country's real economy and need to be managed in a totally different way, with more of an M&A approach. In this case we're talking about loans and businesses that are still alive and can be helped back to recovery.”
Fintech and Proptech: discussing new technology, Serrini put the spotlight on the BlinkS digital trading marketplace for loan portfolios launched by the Prelios Group, which recently signed a strategic partnership with Centrale Credit Solutions to promote the adoption of BlinkS at all 79 banks in the Cassa Centrale Group. "Through BlinkS we put buyers and sellers into contact with one another and provide all the information they need for portfolio valuation, with what are known as data tapes, together with all our know-how. BlinkS is the first Italian marketplace and one of the very first in Europe in this sector. Digital platforms are attracting great attention from both the EU and regulators, starting with the ECB, who see these initiatives as a winning driver for the development of an effective and efficient secondary market.”