This means that, in legal terms, their acceptance is mandatory provided the parties to the contract have not expressly agreed any other form of payment. In the real world, the acceptance of cash in daily economic transactions, however, is not based on this legal obligation.
Compared with the peak of 2015 and net of loan loss provisions, NPLs have more than halved, falling from € billion to € billion last March; their ratio to total loans has gone down from 9.8 to 4.2 per cent. Profitability has shown signs of recovery, linked to the reduction in loan loss provisions and the gradual decline in operating costs.