Thinking of the banks one would recall the "Canti Orfici" by Dino Campana. And maybe that's exactly how it is. The great and unfortunate poet from Marradi (Florence) loved the juxtapositions and contrasts of colours, music and verses as if their discontinuities and contrasts revealed the forbidden essence of life. The suggestion comes from the presentation of .Banca by Cabel, an innovative outsourcer in the reshaping of banking processes. Banca is a fully automated micro counter able to make the customer carry out all banking operations, guiding him remotely thanks to the help of a videoconference operator even several kilometers away. In the conception of the creators it should be a useful tool for overseeing the banking territory at low cost.
How to frame such an initiative when in the world of banks there are strategies so inflated as to prove cloying: linear cuts, redundancies, closure of branches and liquidation of assets that were strategic up to yesterday. And this for a spending review which, in the name of a belated run-up to efficiency after years of waste, proposes an inglorious withdrawal from the territory, without regard for the economic and social damage deriving from the exclusion from banking services of part of the population until recently coaxed as a real asset to real business banking. What is the point of investing in innovation and technology in such a context of unconditional cuts? Are you sure that a country like ours can afford to pursue the transformation goals of an industry that needs to be reconverted like banking?
A look at what is happening and we will better understand what the title means: the banks in the area risk creating a vacuum. The acclaimed local banks, including the larger ones - argued the practitioners and academics of the subject - take care of the territory, incorporate thousands of shareholders who become their customers and are able to monitor credit lines better than large institutions precisely because a president or a director in office for twenty years or more really knows how the business is in the area.
A bit like a scrupulous gardener who knows how to eliminate parasites from plants, when to prune deciduous branches, how to shelter crops from hail and cold. In the smaller banks, proximity to the customer, the crystallization of forms, the sharing of real estate deals were praised. A sort of division of labor in the supply of credit which unfortunately will no longer have success in our country: both, large and small, have ended up in many cases by conversing with the local cliques of politics and, unfortunately, sometimes of the underworld.
And the math doesn't add up because the local banks were the best as they knew the area! And so many of the praises woven are no longer current and attention is directed to the solution of banking crises, given that the virtuous mechanisms encapsulated like DNA in the many savings banks, popular banks and mutual banks and even the largest Italian territorial bank, the MPS, scattered in the third and fourth thriving Italy are no longer there. The almost elegiac vision collided with the brutal force of history and reality. In general, the mechanism has, in the end, worked backwards. In too many cases, the top bodies have prosecuted maladministration, in complicity with a social base tamed by favors and favors that consolidated the bank's operations with friends of friends.
Things by now known that have been reflected in losses and operating costs that are no longer sustainable. The macroeconomic consequences are devastating. Banking activity, in many parts of Italy, almost no longer exists and not only in terms of intermediation due to the ominous effects of the credit crunch! As is well known, the bank does three things: money, credit and finance. In addition to credit, the situation is even more negative in the monetary function. According to the latest data released by the European Central Bank, our country is a unique case in the world. In fact, today not only the problems of the transition to the single European payment area (SEPA) or of more or less won battles in the war on cash are posed; today the country is dramatically playing the fate of the national payments industry relegated, with its negligible volumes, to an ancillary role compared to the main European competitors.
Just four billion transactions a year compared to 18/19 billion each of the three leading countries of the UK, Germany and France. Ten years ago in relative terms we were much better positioned. If we associate the credit crunch and the decrease in payment services, a picture of progressive banking desertification emerges, i.e. the removal of families and businesses from banks with very high social costs. The strategy of restarting from the void that the banks continue to dig into the territory is the only feasible one with new initiatives centered on financial inclusion and the development of more efficient payments for households and businesses, since they are essential services that can no longer be postponed. I want to say more: they are citizens' rights.
And perhaps they are also the most serene way to return to credit, avoiding dangerous shortcuts that generate further forms of disintermediation (read minibonds and the like). It is now time to get ready to work seriously, halting the decline which instead seems stubbornly pursued, digging a growing void in the territory. One must not die of credit restriction and omission of banking services, because one is heading towards a sort of guilty self-destruction. Cabel's .Banca micro-window is an innovative and convenient way to restart, moving away from the unresponsible choices of recent years.
And it is a non-counter-centric choice in the sense that through these structures, spread throughout the area, other services, both public and private individuals, as well as bank ones. It is an opportunity to rediscover those public utility functions that the bank has always had in development as an infrastructure, even before being a company. And then, borrowing Campana's words, we could affirm, with reborn hope, that, in the worst of all possible worlds, something goes instead for the best.
