Please join S&P Global Ratings’ leading European bank analysts for a live interactive webinar from Tuesday, March 2, when the team provided an update on our recent (Feb. 26) outlook reviews on six leading European banks:
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ABN AMRO
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Banco de Sabadell
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Barclays
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Commerzbank
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Deutsche Bank
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Nordea
These reviews included a focus on the affected banks’ likely balance sheet resilience in the face of the pandemic, as well as their medium-term profitability outlook.
While we still consider it too early to undertake a broader review of our negatively biased ratings across European banking systems, we undertook this review on the six banks because we saw idiosyncratic reasons to re-evaluate them sooner.
More broadly, the prospects for the European banking industry remain uncertain, despite unprecedented government fiscal support that will, in general, likely avoid the sharp cyclical economic downturn becoming an acute capital event. Economic downside risks persist and, even under our base case, the effects on bank asset quality are unlikely to become clear until much later in 2021. In addition, bank management teams across the region face a common but differing intensity of challenge to adjust to the persistent weak revenue environment and imperative of digital transformation.