After a year in which shipping banks saw loan portfolios hurt by a wave of prepayments, one niche Greek lender is ready to embark on fresh deals after keeping its credit volumes broadly stable.

Aegean Baltic Bank, known as ABBank and backed by the Tsakos and Coustas families, closed 2023 with about €506m ($550m) worth of gross loans — just shy of the €519m it had at the end of 2022, according to interim unaudited figures.