“The growth trend that has been a characteristic of Prelios in the last few years will certainly continue. First, because we've decided to operate on the Italian market, which is the most interesting and offers better opportunities than other markets, and where Prelios has a unique positioning.” Riccardo Serrini, Prelios Group CEO since 2016, was interviewed on June 14 by the Director of Class CNBC Andrea Cabrini for the CEO Talks of the Class Editori Group's TV network. "We have ample room for growth, both in credit management, where our local presence and vertical integration mean we offer better performance levels than our competitors both in investment management products like funds, SICAFs, separate accounts, and in other alternative products, to attract institutional and private investors with longer-term investment profiles. Prelios’ core resource are its more than 700 men and women trained inside the Group and talents often recruited from international markets, together with a network of more than 2,500 professionals based across Italy who collaborate with us.”
Serrini added: “Our estimates for distressed loan volumes are considerable, we expect to see a rise of between 100-130 billion euro over the next two to three years. We are the largest private UTP manager for institutional investors: all this after a period when Prelios was itself a UTP.” Management of UTPs is “very different” to management of NPLs, according to the Prelios CEO. “The NPL world is an asset liquidation world largely tied to the judicial system – which unfortunately does not function well –where our counterparts are often receivers, liquidators and administrators. Whereas in UTPs we’re in contact with debtors who are active, who are working, companies that need to achieve the revenues and margins to grow. It is vital to help companies return to a performing basis so they can then access a whole range of tools that are not available to UTP debtors, such as State-guaranteed loans and moratoriums.”
Riccardo Serrini noted that Prelios had been elected #Npl Servicer of the Year at the GlobalCapital European Securitization Awards 2021. Almost simultaneously, Fitch Ratings announced that it had upgraded Prelios Credit Servicing S.p.A.’s ratings as a special servicer of NPL portfolios to RSS1- and CSS1- (the previous ratings were, respectively, RSS2+ and CSS2+). “Prelios is an integrated platform that covers every stage in the credit and real estate cycles. We are the largest UTP managers for banks and institutional investors, both through credit securitizations and with tools linked to the investment management world. Prelios Sgr manages the largest fund for real estate UTPs, Back 2 Bonis, set up in partnership with Amco, with a GBV of around 970 million euro, which we expect to close by the end of the year at around 1.5 billion euro, which will make it the largest credit fund in Italy. We're also working on products that facilitate access to credit to help UTP companies overcome a temporary crisis.”
Below, the full interview with Riccardo Serrini: