The prior studies defined overconfidence as a rise in one's self-confidence or self-assessment that leads to optimistic beliefs that can impact decisions. CEO overconfidence is one of the traits that has captured the interest of researchers during the past decades. Many studies have shed light on CEO overconfidence in the corporate environment, particularly in the context of financial markets, however, little is known about its impact on the banking sector. Our research seeks to fill a specific gap in the literature by examining the impact of CEO overconfidence on a bank's asset quality. We depend on an investment-based proxy to measure CEO overconfidence “CAPEX". Our analysis depends on a cross-country sample of sixty-six listed European banks from 2014Q1-2021Q4. The empirical results show that overconfident CEOs tend to underestimate borrowers' creditworthiness and overestimate future returns from loans leading to poor asset quality, high non-performing loans, and high loan loss provisions. This study contributes to a better understanding of the risk of overconfident executives and hence, the findings should be of interest to regulators and shareholders as it shows that overconfident CEOs can reduce the quality of the bank loans.