By Nikos Kotsikopoulos
The second largest asset of Greek banks after their loan portfolios is bonds. Banks increased these bonds and in 2025, and continued to increase them this year in the first quarter both Piraeus and Eurobank.
In particular, in 2025 banks added 10.6 billion euro bonds to their portfolios and eventually reached the end of the year 89.99 billion euros in bonds from 79.37 billion euros in 2024. An increase of EUR 10.6 billion, carried out with markets mainly foreign, European bonds.
They bought government bonds of other countries worth around EUR 6.6 billion in 2025 and achieved good dissemination for security reasons, in addition to the interest they receive. Also for security reasons, nearly 85.5% of the bonds are to be held to maturity and are valued at amortised cost rather than fair value. Which means that valuation is not affected by daily fluctuations and has no mark to market price update obligation.
But all their portfolios were actually added and shares due to acquisitions, so their total investments are now just over 91 billion euros, from 82.78 billion euros in 2024.
The bond portfolio consists mainly of Greek State titles in 40% and from government bonds of other countries (38%). Includes Greek government bonds worth 34.4 billion euros (of which interest notes EUR 1.8 billion). Positions were marginally reduced at the end of 2025. It was 34.39 billion euros at the end of 2024 with a smaller interest rate participation of 1.58 billion euros.
Foreign bonds increased to 32.85 billion euros, from 26.22 billion euros in 2024 and are the largest increase in 25.3% in bank portfolios. These are mainly EU and G10 bonds. These positions have now reached 8.9% of banks' assets.
The other positions that have increased are Company bonds EUR 512 million in EUR 5,18 billion in total and the shares About EUR 430 million. Various other shares and shares of Mutual Funds also increased by around 910m euros, while bank bonds decreased by 150m euros.
Portfolios consist of securities not affected by daily price changes, nearly 85.5%. The increase in shares and shares of Mutual Funds is mainly due to the completion of the acquisition of National Insurance by Piraeus Bank in November 2025 and secondly to an increase in the portfolio of shares of a subsidiary systemic bank.
Greek government bonds and interest notes account for about 9% of the assets of Greek banks reduced by 0.3% from 2024 (but more than twice as high as the period before the pandemic when it was 16.5 billion euros in December 2019).
In short-term portfolios valued at fair value, banks have 4.9 billion euros of Greek government securities from 4.1 billion euros in December 2024. The value of this portfolio as a percentage of their assets increased to 1.3%, from 1.2% in December 2024.
