On May 5th & 6th, Hipoges was present at the “NPL Europe 2022” summit, which took place at the Pullman London St Pancras, and was pleasantly hosted by SmithNovak. Once again, an event face-to-face, showing how the world is going back to its old norm.
This event, in which Hipoges was a Standard Sponsor, had a strong focus on everything that was once missing from the events – 1:1 meetings, networking sessions, social events, etc. The event showcased a line-up of some of Europe’s leading distressed investing experts from 29 countries who presented their outlooks and perspectives on the new opportunities in the European NPL market.
Besides its presence as sponsor for “NPL Europe 2022”, Hipoges was represented by its General Manager & Partner, Hugo Velez. The Hipoges’ Manager shared his expertise during the panel on the Servicing Market, moderated by Pedro Malaquias, Partner na Uría Menédez. During this panel, the speakers were able to discuss what new trends have emerged in the European Servicing landscape since the start of the pandemic, what IT solutions and other processes and resources do Servicers need to implement, as well as other subjects of importance.
The NPL Europe 2022 & it’s successes
The SmithNovak event, “NPL Europe 2022”, fostered great discussions of importance for the European NPL Market, and reunited all the main players of the sector. This event counted on more than 400 delegates, 200 companies, 100 speakers from 29 countries, 50 sponsors, all gathered in a two-day event with various blocks of sessions, as well networking opportunities.
From the 29 countries represented, United Kingdom represented 42%, being the country with the biggest representativity, Spain was 10%, Portugal 0,6% and Greece was 0,5%. The industry with greatest representation was the Investment industry, followed by Servicing, Banking and Consultancy.
Gifford West, Alpine Tremont’s Managing Director, shared a few words of feedback after this successful event “NPL Europe 2022”:
“SmithNovak did an outstanding job of gathering the great and the good of the European NPL industry and organizing an excellent program. The sponsors presented some insightful material […].
[…] The consensus of the attendees was that the lending industry is headed into a perfect storm of adverse factors. A global recession. A supply chain crisis. The knock-on effects of the war in Ukraine and the related sanctions. The withdrawal of COVID support across every economy causing the failure of many businesses that were just holding on. Rising interest rates/inflation. With all these factors, how could we not be seeing a spike in NPLs?
[…] The European NPL industry is ready for a massive wave of non-performing commercial real estate and residential loans. Servicers are in place, AI valuation models have been developed, and the governments have adapted foreclosure law to make pricing much more straightforward. Unfortunately, the consensus is that this is not where the spike will initially hit. The majority of speakers see the next NPL spike in Northern Europe as being in the SME sector – similar to Italy and Greece in the last cycle. There is some agreement that servicing SME NPLs is challenging and actually suffers from diseconomies of scale – bigger does not necessarily mean better. Some floated the idea that regional bad banks would be the answer – others thought that that would make the problem worse. The industry needs some new tools if this is what happens.
[…] Finally, proven servicers will be the kingmakers of the next NPL crisis. The big PE funds have created massive stores of funds, but they do not want to get back into the servicing business. In the background, the consumer servicing platforms have been consolidating. The gap remains for the scale SME servicer, if such an entity can be built. […]”