“Covid will only end in two years, a tough autumn awaits us”. If Bill Gates, one of the richest men and entrepreneurs in the world, says so, it is to be believed. A discourse not only in healthcare that invests the entire economy from global to local. Italy, the realm of SMEs, is no exception.
But there are stories that allow us to understand how our businesses can do it. Like the one that has seen a Bolognese company take center stage in recent months, Meccanica Vecchiatti, born in the late seventies, on the initiative of the founders Gino and Vasco Vecchiatti, as a turning company. Today, after experiencing the technological evolution of the last forty years and having survived the economic crisis of 2009, the company - still managed by the Vecchiatti family - manages dozens of orders and it is also a supplier of the Japanese giant Honda.
However, a reality that risked being swept away by the coronavirus emergency, as Mrs. Marina Gragnanini, the company's accountant for over 14 years, tells us. “Without this funding from Italianonsiferma I really don't know how we could have done,” she says. The funding you are referring to is that obtained through Banca Generali, which with the fintech company Credimi, in recent months, has made a series of loans available to SMEs with the aim of bringing private savings to the rescue of the real economy, read companies such as Meccanica Vecchiatti.
Specifically, right from the very first stages of the crisis, the Banca del Leone Alato, through collaboration with Credimi, was able to guarantee that its savers would invest in the credits of healthy but struggling companies, such as this one. All with a speed that Marina herself finds it hard to tell: "Just a few days after the factory closed due to the lockdown, we had confirmation that the amount requested by Dr. Vecchiatti had been accepted". “I repeat - she says excitedly - without this funding we would have been in real difficulty, we would not have been able to manage ordinary situations also because we had already "saturated" with traditional banking channels, since last year we had applied for loans for the acquisition of our industrial warehouses”.
A recurring theme. In Italy companies are always undercapitalized and the banking channel is almost always the only source to ask for support. Hence the usefulness of the #Italianonsiferma operation, thanks to which in recent months, not only the Vecchiatti company, but hundreds of SMEs have had overall access to 100 million euros of liquidity in the form of 5-year loans guaranteed by the State Guarantee Fund (90%), with Generali, parent company of the Private Bank, which underwrote a 10% share (10 million) of the issue. With a simple underlying mechanism: the companies that applied for loans were analyzed by the Credimi platform with which Banca Generali has partnered.
A technological process which, in fact, makes it possible to speed up times considerably, leading, in the space of a few days – as in this case – to the disbursement of liquidity, thus allowing many companies to overcome the difficulties. The words of the head of the company Angelo Vecchiatti in this sense are clear: “For us, this loan was much more than an injection of liquidity in a moment of crisis. It allowed us to continue with the normal administrative activities serenely, we were able to pay salaries and suppliers, and above all to look to the future with confidence. I was struck by the speed of delivery times and the simplicity of the processes”.
Satisfaction also from Banca Generali with the deputy general manager, Andrea Ragaini who explains: “Stories like this confirm that our commitment leads to a double result. Thanks also to Credimi, who has strong skills in analyzing loan applications, we have achieved the goal of helping SMEs in difficulty and at the same time, we as a private investor have managed to offer our customers the opportunity for diversification and obtain attractive returns and obtain greater protection, sheltered from the risks of the financial markets”.
Innovative solutions, therefore, to meet the challenge that Banca Generali has accepted: to make a concrete contribution to the real economy through savers who believe in local companies. The recovery also passes from here.
