There will be no landing in Trieste. Intesa Sanpaolo renounces the conquest of Generali which for weeks had sent the whole of Italian finance into fibrillation. After completing its analyzes on "possible industrial combinations with Assicurazioni Generali", the bank led by Carlo Messina decided not to go ahead because "it has not identified opportunities that meet the criteria of creating and distributing value for its shareholders, consistently with the aim of maintaining the leadership of capital adequacy, with which it regularly evaluates the internal and external growth options for the Group”.
Farewell to Generali is certainly the end of a dream for Intesa Sanpaolo but the wisdom of a bank is also demonstrated by the courage to be able to renounce an acquisition that would have given it immediate prestige but which would have proved very insidious from the point of view in terms of income and assets and would have ended up sacrificing its own shareholders.
Basically, apart from the price, the purchase of Generali would not have allowed Intesa to keep up the dividend that it distributes to its shareholders every year (10 billion cash over 4 years) nor to raise profitability and maintain its leadership of capital solidity among the banks: hence the renunciation and farewell to Trieste.
However, the black smoke on Generali will push Intesa to grow more "endogenously" and above all to focus, as an official note explains, on "further significant growth in wealth management", i.e. managed savings and private banking, where already holds positions of market leader, and to grow in the non-life insurance branch "raising its degree of penetration among customers to the levels reached by the life branch, with appropriate interventions in synergy with the banking networks", confirming that there is a logic in bank and insurance combinations.
Carlo Messina will also give a strong boost to cross-selling, "following the creation of the first proximity bank, made up of the recently acquired Banca Itb and focused on instant banking" and will focus even more on multi-channel and digital banking. All operations that will compensate for the renunciation of the acquisition of Generali and will aim to raise profitability also through a significant reduction in non-performing loans but without extraordinary operations.
