Consumer credit NPLs in Morocco

A consumer NPL book is not a miniature mortgage portfolio. Balances are often too small to justify property enforcement and too numerous to underwrite like corporate files. Before importing a recovery curve from another segment, re-read the loan tape with that constraint in view.

What the tape must show

Critical fields include product type, balance, delinquency age, last useful contact, reason for non-payment where captured, and any guarantee or insurance. Missing fields across a large share of lines are not formatting noise: they force a more conservative contact and reconstitution assumption.

Granularity also changes sampling. Fifty corporate file reviews can be informative. On ten thousand consumer accounts, the same count covers only a thin slice. Sampling must be stratified by balance, age and channel, or the bid absorbs a silent bias.

Recovery and unit cost

When average balances are low, repeated human contact can consume a material share of expected recovery. That is where a routine, amicable-first operating model becomes central to portfolio economics. A systematic judicial strategy on small tickets is usually a tail case, not the base case.

At end-2025 Bank Al-Maghrib published an NPL stock of MAD 102.3 billion and an 8.3% social-basis NPL ratio. Those aggregates frame the market. They do not give contact rates or cost per account for a sold consumer book.

Limited security and recourse

Many consumer exposures offer only personal recourse and, at most, a guarantor. Pricing cannot lean on a real-estate market value. It rests on voluntary payment probability, promise-keeping and the cost of maintaining contact.

Where security exists, it must be verified before it is monetised in the model. An unverified insurance claim or unnotified guarantee is not the same as enforceable support. The price should separate accounts with demonstrated extra recourse from those with merely asserted support.

What not to conclude

A consumer book is not 'easy' because it is granular, nor 'impossible' because tickets are small. It is operating-model sensitive. Until servicing cost is explicit, a headline recovery rate is an orphan number.

This note does not publish a standard consumer recovery rate for Morocco. Any bid has to start from the tape, contact rules and settlement authorities that actually apply to the portfolio.

In this series

• Morocco NPL market
• NPL valuation Morocco
• Investing checklist
• Bid-ask on Morocco's NPL secondary market
• Overdraft NPLs in Morocco

This note is a method of reading a file or a published series. It is not legal, tax or investment advice, and it is not an opinion on a particular exposure. Serenor Capital does not buy claims for its own account, manage a fund, or carry on collection.

Sources and references

• Bank Al-Maghrib, Annual Report on Banking Supervision, financial year 2025 — PDF
• Bank Al-Maghrib, Circular No. 19/G/2002 of 23 December 2002 on the classification of claims and their provisioning, as amended — PDF
• Circular No. 1/W/2025, adopted on 5 December 2025, effective 1 January 2027. It does not restate the 2012–2025 figures discussed here.
• Dahir forming the Code of Obligations and Contracts (DOC); Commercial Code, Book V, as amended by Law 73-17, where relevant.
• Serenor public series — Morocco NPL Monitor and methodology