Even if it goes through, the merger of a part of Monte dei Paschi in Unicredit it will not close the season of mergers and bank consolidation. Two large national hubs – the one headed by Intesa Sanpaolo and the one leveraged by Unicredit – are important but, as a former high-ranking banker like Alessandro Profumo said, they are not enough because businesses, especially small and medium-sized ones, they need a wider supply of credit and financial instruments.
The spotlights are therefore projected on Bper-Unipol-Polaris of Sondrio, on the Bpm bank, its believe and, as far as the South is concerned, sul Mediocredito Centrale through the new Popular Bank of Bari. The confirmation, as regards the prospects and ambitions of your bank, is explicitly confirmed in an interview with Sun 24 Hours yesterday, released by the CEO of Banco Bpm, Joseph Chestnut, who makes no secret of his plans for a new aggregation.
Castagna, who has just archived a respectable semester which more than tripled its profits (361 million euro), confirmed that it is working on a new industrial plan which will be presented to the market "within the approval of the third quarter", i.e. probably by the end of October and which will leverage the containment costs (which already from the second half will benefit from the closure of 300 branches and access to the redundancy fund of 1.600 employees) and on the increase in revenues with an eye above all to the development of bancassurance and digital.
"We also want to accelerate on private banking, asset management and corporate, in particular towards mid-caps", added Castagna, specifying that the new plan will be stand alone because "the bank alone can give important returns to shareholders", but he acknowledged that "it is evident that virtuous combinations, with banks that do not need restructuring, they can create synergies that act as a multiplier for returns“. We will talk about it in the coming months because "today - the CEO of Banco Bpm pointed out - there is nothing on the table".
