A small group of bankers in Hong Kong tasked with cleaning up the city’s unprecedented pile of bad debt is done playing nice.

They number under 200 people, less than 0.07% of the city’s finance workforce. But these so-called special asset bankers are up against a large and increasingly urgent task: cutting a HK$200 billion ($25.5 billion) pile of soured debt that’s pushed the city’s distressed loan ratio to a two-decade high.