The serious cases of crisis of the local bank are also manifesting themselves through outflows of deposits that are directed to other operators either because they are considered more solid or because they are able to offer more advanced services and/or at lower costs.
Among the former are the major entities of the Italian banking system, among the latter the network banks, on the hunt for savings to manage. Forms of banking disintermediation are also beginning to be observed, above all due to the, albeit still slow, growth of direct lending platforms.
And the phenomenon of cash stored in safety deposit boxes has assumed such importance as to attract the attention of the Government to the search for new means of contrasting illegality and additional sources of tax revenue.
The phenomenon of traditional banking disintermediation must make us reflect on the possible transformations of the methods of production and distribution of typical retail banking activities, i.e. mortgages, loans to SMEs, consumer credit, family savings management and payment services.
This prospect, albeit in its infancy, is supported by the new relationship between finance and technology, which also favors the development opportunities of specialized financial intermediaries, other than banks, through new "remotized" processes that technology makes available.
In Italy, a profound regulatory review was recently carried out with regard to this segment, through the creation of a new register of operators pursuant to article 106 of the Consolidated Banking Act and the introduction of more stringent supervisory methods.
The interested operators belong to the categories of credit guarantee trusts, credit financial intermediaries (consumer loans, salary-backed loans, issue of guarantees) and trust companies (heading of assets).
The framework of regulatory innovations is completed by the changes introduced, also recently, in relation to credit brokers and agents in financial activity (OAM Register), those concerning payment institutions and electronic money, pursuant to the new European directive on services of payment and those on microcredit, while the methods of entry and exit from the market of SIMs and SGRs are to be considered mature by law.
Once the entire sector has been made more reliable for the consumer, an increase in the range of products is undoubtedly to be hoped for, but we must keep in mind from the beginning some conditions that can really mark the difference compared to a past that has always looked with greater trust in banks.
It is true that banks have the ability to operate in the round in credit, financial intermediation and related services, but it is equally true that these operators, due to the specific risks of the category they belong to, have lower regulatory costs.
They can therefore help meet the financial needs of businesses and households with a growing attitude, innovative methods and transparency towards the consumer, developing new business models.
An issue that has not been investigated so far is that of the relationships that can be established between specialized non-bank intermediaries, especially those not belonging to banking groups, to enhance the offer to the market.
The missing requisite for credit guarantee consortia, credit institutions and SIMs essentially concerns services of a monetary nature, to disburse loans, collect installments, carry out other monetary transactions, up to the point of channeling resources towards wealth management products, without encroaching on the abusive collection of savings, remained the absolute prerogative of the banks.
Payment services appear to be the real enabling factor of any innovation in the financial and commercial fields, through which these needs can now be satisfied.
Their institutional entry into the market has definitively broken the monopoly of the current account to settle any type of monetary transaction, creating opportunities for greater operational independence from banks and for more convenient solutions in terms of costs for customers.
More specifically, the policies to discourage the use of cash, the progressive loss of weight of checks, the zeroing of interest on sight bank accounts and the need for greater transparency in terms of prices and conditions highlight the advantages of the account of payment, a European instrument, which can also be placed by payment institutions (payment institutions and electronic money institutions).
In the most advanced versions, it allows all types of electronic collections and payments to be made, in full compliance with SEPA standards and to be mobilized via cards on private and international circuits, internet banking platforms and mobile telephony. It also allows much more transparent pricing policies for the benefit of the consumer and incentives such as cash back or value back and is practically exempt from stamp duty.
The methods for managing these partnership relations between specialized non-banking intermediaries can be of a contractual nature, including multilateral ones, through recourse to the so-called network contract, which, introduced into the Italian legal system in 2009, aims to encourage both the innovative capacity as the efficiency of the member companies.
The network contract lends itself, by its nature, to developing complementary profiles, allowing for the creation of forms of horizontal collaboration, in compliance with the entrepreneurial autonomy of each intermediary, to jointly manage non-competitive activities, to be offered jointly, pursuing operational efficiency objectives at the same time, through common choices regarding IT and professional services, selection and training of personnel, management of distribution networks.
Other examples of collaboration are easily conceivable with regard to the nascent direct lending, crowdfunding and electronic commerce platforms.
The value of such a complex network contract is above all of a strategic nature, because it presupposes that a common project arises from it aimed at managing a quid novo for the promoting companies and for the market, to the point of representing an effective alternative to the methods of the more traditional banking.
This business model, new for the Italian market of non-bank intermediaries, would have the possibility of generating a minimum of production scale, but above all of creating economies of scope, essential for the survival of small entities, by reconfiguring a less dispersed from the present.
Among the innovations, the prospect of launching and growing the so-called Smart communities should be considered, in which the enhancement of a plurality of digital services for the citizen starts from the usability of financial and payment ones, which also require research and experimentation to grow competitiveness.
But what are the recent events of a payments industry in its infancy?
Unfortunately, we have to point out some negative factors such as the fragmentation of operators and the concentration in activities that do not help the diffusion of European standard electronic payments, as shown by the merciless statistics of the ECB, which continue to rank us in the last places among European countries. While in terms of GDP we account for about 12% of the total, in SEPA payments other than cash we fluctuate around a 4% share of the transactions that are carried out annually in the EU, equal to over 110 billion.
Payment institutions and e-money institutions are currently about seventy; of these, the majority are authorized to operate in emigrants' remittances, while another good number deal with postal payment slips, on which we are seeing the re-centralisation of the Italian Post Office in recent days, with massive advertising campaigns.
Both of the aforementioned payment instruments are not Sepa compliant, unlike payment cards, wire transfers (Sepa Credit Transfer) and direct debits (Sepa Direct Debit) and are also more expensive.
Furthermore, a third between IP and IMEL has its headquarters in Anglo-Saxon countries, from which they operate through the European license without settlement structures in our country, with not secondary competitive advantages.
Transactions with credit and debit cards then maintain a slower pace of development than the European average, causing us to accumulate further delays, while the country suffers the costs of higher payment infrastructures, the latter having grown much faster than their use it is done, as evidenced by the number of ATMs and Pos, which together with that of bank branches, places us in the first places in Europe.
A not insignificant contradiction if we also consider the cost of regulation, which is very pervasive especially in terms of IT security and the fight against money laundering and terrorism, to be spread over a much lower total and per capita number of transactions than in our competitor countries .
Five years after the birth of the first operators specializing in payment instruments, the context would therefore seem favorable for a structural change in the industry as a whole.
We therefore hope for the first mergers between payment institutions and between payment institutions and imel, and the acquisition of licenses of this kind by large national operators operating in large-scale distribution, telephony, motorway services and so on. Only in this way will it be possible to create a more robust structure, capable of opening up to market prospects, to counter, at least in part, the now imminent affirmation of the large international e-commerce platforms.
Otherwise, we will have to resign ourselves to an increasingly marginal role of our payments industry, definitively losing the possibility of hooking up to the bandwagon of the only activity that has remained unscathed by the effects of the long economic crisis of recent years.
And remaining on the title of the article, we want to close with a reference to the need for systemic actions also in terms of citizens' financial education, to be based on clearer and more reliable information for a correct perception of the advantages associated with tools such as payment and electronic money.
The need to break the short circuit of information that has so far proved to be insufficient, if not even distorting the citizen's choices, must in fact avoid cases such as the one that recently occurred to a friend of ours who, having gone to one of the first banks in the country to sell own convertible bonds, was discouraged by the security official with the laughable argument that "now with Trump the bonds will rise in price".
Better quality financial information is also something new that needs to be definitively brought to light.
** G. Coppola and D.Corsini are co-authors of the e-book being published by Goware entitled "How to defend ourselves from banks to spend less and save our savings".
