A fifth of private receivables are currently classified under the Central Bank of Tunisia’s framework, and provisioning coverage remains below 50% of exposure.
Between the prudential obligation to recognize risk and the contractual duty to support the client company, the Tunisian credit institution evolves on a legal tightrope whose contours tighten as Basel III and IFRS 9 standards come into effect.
Credit risk and absorption capacity
The annual report of the Central Bank of Tunisia on banking supervision places the overall rate of classified loans at 14.9% of commitments at the end of 2025, up from 14.5% a year earlier. The gap widens notably when isolating the private sector.
Indeed, classified exposures to private enterprises reach 20.8% of the outstanding balance, compared with only 2% for public enterprises, a 1-to-10 ratio that shifts the bulk of credit risk directly onto the non-state entrepreneurial fabric.
The outstanding amount of unpaid or disputed professional receivables has also risen by 10.9% year on year, moving from 15 to 16.6 billion dinars between the end of 2024 and the end of 2025, with the industry alone accounting for 52.7% of this mass.
This deterioration occurs while risk coverage by provisions remains structurally weak: the coverage rate of classified loans, which fell to 50.5% in 2024 after peaking at 55.1% in 2022, has only recovered to 55% by mid-2025 according to S&P Global Ratings, which anticipates a rise in the volume of doubtful receivables to around 16% of the total portfolio in the next twenty-four months and a sustainably high cost of risk, around 150 basis points.
Fitch Ratings notes, for its part, that the rise in the cost of risk reached 21% year over year in the first half of 2025, weighing on bank profitability already measured, with an average return on equity close to 10.6% over the period 2022 – Q1 2025.
Indicative of an aging stock of risk rather than a recent flow, the share of classified exposures in the compromised category stood at 82.6% of the total classified in 2024, a level that reflects the sluggishness of cleanup mechanisms more than a sudden surge in defaults.
Regulatory capital and cost of funding
