Digital banking
If you’ve been following UniCredit of late, none of these results should be especially surprising. Ever since September 2021, when the Italian bank unveiled a new leadership structure and a revamped digital division, it was clear that UniCredit had pulled up its socks and was marching towards a tech-built tomorrow. And as that flurry of Google results implies, the Milanese giant is clearly part of the way there already. “Digital and data are a key pillar of our strategic plan with the ultimate ambition to be a truly digital bank, powered by data in all we do,” explains Luboslava Uram, UniCredit Italy’s chief digital and information officer, and the group head of the bank’s retail business platform. “This means we are internalising necessary core competencies, as well as simplifying and streamlining our digital operations.”
Nor is UniCredit stopping there. Spending €2.8bn on digital and data over the next few years, much recent emphasis has gone into improving life for its business customers. From aiding SMEs with liquidity management and accounting, to helping them understand investment costs, UniCredit is quickly becoming an invaluable ally across the Italian economy. Not that any of this is easy. On the contrary, building a new digital agenda requires thoughtful collaboration with fintechs, the state and customers, as well as intelligent internal reforms. Get it right, however, and Uram and her colleagues could yet push digitalisation at UniCredit to even greater heights – and perhaps even transform the fortunes of the country they call home.
Digital dedication
Few people at UniCredit are better placed to understand the bank’s digital transformation than Uram herself. An industry veteran, having been at the bank since 2010, she’s worked across the continent, spending time at UniCredit offices in Ljubljana, Sofia, Bucharest and Vienna. For the last few years, she’s been based at UniCredit’s shiny Milan headquarters and was recently promoted to lead the bank’s retail business platform. All this is to say that Uram is someone worth listening to – and she’s in no doubt as to where UniCredit’s technological strategy ultimately stems from. “Over the last decade,” she explains, “digitalisation has become not only a priority, but also the reality in many aspects of our private and professional lives and it underwent a further major leap during the Covid-19 pandemic. On the banking side, we are moving from automation, robotisation and digitalisation of paper-based processes to fully digitally native and data-driven customer experience.” Consider the statistics and it’s hard to disagree. Even in technophobic Italy, the digital sector grew from €68.7bn to €75bn between 2017 and 2021, while areas like healthcare witnessed even more impressive growth. This direction of travel is echoed in the country’s banking sector too. At the top of the pile,
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UniCredit and Intesa Sanpaolo have both invested heavily in retail banking apps, progress that has gradually influenced Italy’s gaggle of smaller institutions too. According to a recent report by the Bank of Italy, almost 55% of Italian banks had already implemented fintech projects by 2018, with 60% offering online asset management options too. Yet as Uram’s comments on the life-defining power of technology imply, digitalisation is not some abstract concept that can be imposed from on high. “Customers are a key factor driving the change,” she says, adding that, if anything, these shifts began even before the pandemic.
Beyond this ‘why’, meanwhile, Uram is equally conscious of the ‘how’. To put it another way, it makes little sense to promise an avalanche of new products if they can’t actually be delivered quickly and efficiently. To that end, Uram explains how UniCredit’s new digital-first footing has meant moving “core competencies” in-house. Reorganising into three global platforms – technology, data and business – is one tactic here. Understanding specific local markets is another. “In the long-term, we aim to have the skills and the technology to create a seamless digital offering that can exceed the expectations of our clients,” Uram adds. “In parallel, we are also addressing the challenge of existing legacy.”
A boot time
The Italian economy has not been well for years. Suffering from sclerotic growth since the turn of the millennium, the Bel Paese has long been wracked by wobbly productivity and a budget deficit that only ever seems to get bigger. It goes without saying, meanwhile, that Italy’s desperate clash with Covid-19 left the country even weaker, a situation hardly helped by Europe’s looming energy crisis. And though digitalisation may gradually be sneaking into corporate boardrooms and major banks, the country’s vast array of smaller firms are struggling to adapt. This is hardly a trifling concern: Italy’s 4.3 million SMEs account for a bewildering 99.9% of the nation’s business, yet only two in five have even basic investment in digitalisation. UniCredit may be one of the world’s most important banks – and the only one in Italy to be considered systemically important by the Financial Stability Board – but even it can’t hope to do much to reduce the nation’s debt burden or its declining purchasing power. That’s ultimately the job of Italy’s squabbling coterie of politicians. What UniCredit can do, however, is support companies eager to invest in new digital technologies, while also boosting the country’s economic engine. Central to this work is Partner4Business, launched as part of the government’s post-Covid National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR). Encompassing a suite of 70 services, it offers Italy’s battered SMEs a range of digital tools to support their bottom lines. In practice, that involves
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Opposite: UniCredit’s corporate headquarters in Milan, Italy.
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