SAO PAULO: For many investors, Brazil’s seizure of lender Banco Cruzeiro do Sul was the chronicle of a death foretold. But predicting the future of other small and mid-sized banks in the country is not so easy.
While fraud may have played a role in the central bank’s decision to intervene in Cruzeiro do Sul, the episode offers further evidence that Brazil’s economic growth model based on hefty credit expansion — which for years officials labeled as risk-free — is showing signs of fatigue.
The central bank seized mid-sized lender Cruzeiro do Sul this week and placed it under the administration of banking insurance deposit fund FGC for 180 days after uncovering a series of irregularities. It was the third time that regulators intervened in a so-called mid-cap bank since 2010 after detecting accounting irregularities.
Years of rapid credit expansion in Brazil have resulted in tougher funding and liquidity conditions as well as a relaxation of risk assessment and auditing controls among smaller lenders.
“This model that puts too much emphasis on credit is simply running its course,” said Carlos Coradi, a partner at banking consultancy firm EF&C. “Those frauds look like isolated cases, but to me, the model is finally cracking.”
Assets at mid-cap banks tripled since 2006 at the expense of eroding solvency. As demand for lending remained firm, mid-cap banks embarked on ambitious growth plans that are to blame for their current capital shortfalls, said Federico Rey Marino, an analyst with Raymond James & Associates in Buenos Aires.
More problems may surface if authorities make no moves to fix the segment’s inefficient funding structure, in which cash flow mismatches are frequent, said Coradi, also a former adviser to some banks in the segment. Lenders need to revamp their business model, focusing more on niche products than on fast-growing personal credit, analysts say.
Furthermore, the central bank’s decision to place Cruzeiro do Sul under the administration of privately owned deposit guarantee fund FGC further damaged what little trust market participants had in the segment’s accounting practices.
A flurry of central bank controls aimed at enhancing oversight of the segment in the past year have made it harder for mid-cap lenders to comply with regulations, FGC Chairman Antonio Carlos Bueno said on Monday. And those controls are failing to improve the quality of accounting.
Cruzeiro do Sul’s seizure comes at a time when President Dilma Rousseff is pressing banks to increase lending and cut borrowing costs to revive a sputtering economy. That may further complicate the situation for smaller banks by reducing their revenue and encouraging more questionable loans.
Shares in mid-cap banks are down 4 percent in dollar terms this year, according to the MSCI Brazil Small and Mid Financials Index, on top of a 15 percent slump last year.
“We are concerned about the impact of weak gross domestic product growth on operating performance and share prices” for those banks, Wesley Okada, a banking analyst with Goldman Sachs Group in Sao Paulo, wrote in a recent research note.
More than fraud, investors are worried about the inability of regulators and bankers to fix the funding gap at the core of mid-caps banks’ woes. Mid-cap lenders are too dependent on revenue from bond offerings, securitizations of their own loans and even sales of parts of their own loan book to raise funds.
Likewise, Cruzeiro do Sul and its peers rely heavily on funding that is pegged to market interest rates. The worsening of Europe’s debt crisis has shuttered access to funding.
The future of the mid-cap bank sector is key to Brazil’s banking industry because of its ability to foster competition in a highly concentrated market, Okada said. The nation’s top 15 banks own 75 percent of Brazil’s 5.5 trillion reais ($2.5 trillion) in banking assets, according to central bank data.
The industry has grown at a breakneck pace since former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva allowed lenders to deduct monthly loan installments from workers’ paychecks nine years ago. But fortunes have soured since the bailout of Banco PanAmericano in November 2010.
One way out of the current funk is to go back to basics, Raymond James’ Rey Marino said. Specializing in products such as credit to small enterprises, the niche where these banks started, could buffer them from the highly competitive consumer lending market.
“They will do fine if they go back to being niche banks,” he said.
Brazil’s biggest banks are cutting rates and stretching out terms for consumer loans, buoyed by a strong job market and resilient demand for appliances, cars and travel. Rey Marino said mid-cap banks have no means to compete in those segments. As interest rates fall, mid-cap banks will have to risk more to retain clients, said Jo?o Augusto de Frota Salles, an analyst with Rio de Janeiro-based research company RiskBank.
Mergers among peers may bring some relief but activity has been timid, partly due to uncertainty over the sector’s health.
The creation of payroll loans changed the adversarial relationship between borrowers and banks, quickly becoming Brazil’s fastest-growing loan product and Cruzeiro’s specialty.
Lula’s “credit revolution” was Brazil’s main engine of growth during his eight-year tenure, helping lift more than 30 million people from poverty over the past nine years.
PanAmericano’s $2 billion bailout first raised suspicions of the sector’s accounting practices. And even as government officials rushed to dispel such worries, investors have kept looking for signs of weakness ever since.
Cruzeiro do Sul’s troubles began last year when a local newspaper said the bank reached out to the FGC for short-term support. Rumors that the bank was facing a cash crunch drove its shares down 40 percent last week in light trading volumes.
When announcing the seizure, the central bank said it recently detected the existence of fictitious assets on its balance sheet. The irregularities triggered about $750 million in losses, but that number might grow as auditing continues.