Seven months after announcing plans to team up with an unnamed Far Eastern financing house to provide loans to Greek shipowners, Piraeus Bank revealed on Friday Japan’s Orix Group as its partner.

An “exclusive strategic collaboration” has been concluded between the two firms, Piraeus said in a bourse filing today.

The announcement did not contain information on how much money will be lent other than to say that the cooperation “is expected to expand in both scope and sectors over time”.

Piraeus, a longstanding lender to Greek shipping, is to provide the connections to local maritime companies. Orix, on the other hand, will contribute its financial firepower.

Greek banks can use foreign help to up their game with local shipowners. Greek banks' lending capacity has been curtailed after the country’s crippling debt crisis, which has loaded billions of euros of bad loans on their balance sheets.

Possibly emboldened by the impending announcement of the Orix deal, executives at Piraeus have sounded upbeat recently on its shipfinance prospects.

“We’ve been quite active from last year and I believe the trend will continue over the next five years,” Piraeus head of shipping finance Konstantinos Petropoulos told a Capital Link conference in Athens on 20 February.

The bank, which has a shipping loan portfolio of about $2.1 bn, usually refinances acquisitions of second-hand vessels and loan balloons. It prefers doing business with known owners with good track records.

The exit from shipping of big traditional lenders, like RBS, has created ample opportunities, Petropoulos said. “More and more [Greek] shipping groups that had no relationship with the local finance sector realized that it’s strategically sensible to develop one with a local bank,” he added.

Greek banks, however, are facing mighty competition from Chinese leasing houses. Bank of China and the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) recently set up branches in Athens to cement their growing relations with the Greek business scene, including shipping.

US-based Houlihan Lokey acted as Piraeus’ strategic and financial adviser in the Orix deal.

Houlihan Lokey also advised Piraeus on the sale last year of a deeply discounted shipping loan portfolio to US private equity investor Davidson Kempner Capital Management. That deal fetched €240m on a gross loan book value of €507m ($565m).