From uninvestable to unmissable, the reinvention of the Greek banking sector has been nothing short of extraordinary.

When the International Monetary Fund (IMF) rushed to the rescue of Greece on three separate occasions between 2010 and 2015, the country was the sick man of Europe and its lenders were insolvent.

Of the close to €300bn (￡253bn) channelled into Greece over those years, just under €50bn was used to bail out four lenders. Their balance sheets were recapitalised, and their non-performing loans were restructured to enable them to start lending again.

After a painful period, including harsh rounds of austerity, a new picture of Greece and its banking sector has emerged. The country’s economy is expected to grow by around 2.2pc this year, more than double the 1pc forecast for the wider EU.

Its banks, now profitable, are starting to burnish their growth credentials – they’re even preparing to pay shareholders dividends again.

At the forefront of this renewed vigour is Alpha Bank, or to give it its official name, Alpha Services & Holdings. Greece’s third-largest lender by assets is comfortably back in the black.

It reported a pre-tax profit of €976.5m last year, up 55pc on 2022. The bank has cut its non-performing exposure ratio (essentially, the percentage of non-performing loans) to roughly 5.8pc. In 2019, the ratio stood at 45pc.

At the tail end of last year, the state sold its 9pc stake in the lender to Italy’s UniCredit. That marked the first investment in a Greek bank by a European peer since the financial crisis. The deal also involved a product distribution agreement and a merger in Romania. Alpha Bank is now also poised to pay a dividend, equivalent to 20pc of last year’s profits.

The rejuvenation of the Greek banking sector, and Alpha Bank in particular, has attracted the interest of some of the world’s most successful investors, six of whom hold stakes in the bank. Each of them is among the top 3pc of the more than 10,000 fund managers whose performance is tracked by financial publisher Citywire.

Their backing has led Alpha Bank to receive a AAA rating from Citywire Elite Companies, which rates companies based on their ownership by the world’s best-performing professional stock pickers. One of them is Dominic Bokor-Ingram, who holds Alpha Bank as the largest position in two of his portfolios – Fiera Oaks EM Select and Magna New Frontiers.

Bokor-Ingram said he first started buying Alpha, and other Greek banks, in early 2021, when double-digit percentage returns on equity started to look like a realistic possibility. As well as rating management highly, Bokor-Ingram was attracted by the price of the shares’ low valuation relative to continental peers despite increased certainty about the future.