Guarantee fund for small and medium-sized enterprises: more than 2015 new guarantees were issued in 102 alone. From the start date of its operations (January 2000), the Fund has assumed gradually increasing importance, especially in recent years, marked by a sharp contraction in bank credit.
Now we are moving towards its reform. The central point – as Undersecretary Antonio Gentile was able to recall when answering a question in the Productive Activities Committee of the Chamber – is the introduction of an internal rating model of the Fund for the purposes of assessing the creditworthiness of companies, which will replace the current economic-financial evaluation system based on the use of credit scoring. The latter is a score that estimates the credit risk for the lender: it calculates the probability that the customer is able to honor his debt within the established period of time.
The adoption of the rating model will allow an accurate estimate of the riskiness of companies. Knowledge of the riskiness of the entrepreneur will allow the Ministry of Economic Development to make the interventions of the Fund more selective, targeted and effective, through an articulation of the coverages which provides for gradually increasing measures as the riskiness of the company increases.
With the reform of the Fund, the aim is to obtain two results: 1) a greater focus of public support in favor of risky companies that have a real need for support from the State; 2) at the same time, knowledge of the degree of risk of the companies will allow the Fund manager to make prudential provisions against the guarantees issued calibrated according to the risks effectively assumed by the Fund.
The reform process of the Fund is at an advanced stage. The tests of the model, conducted in order to compare, on the same groups of companies, the behavior of the Fund's rating model with that of the internal rating models of a group of banks that have offered to collaborate, are nearing completion.
