“Shared points of reference are needed on corporate credit”: this is the warning launched by Piero Torretta, president of Uni (Italian unification body), on the occasion of the inaugural speech of the conference "Guidelines for the financing of constructions: the Uni technical specification", organized by the engineers of Turin and Milan at the Milan Fair in the context of MadeExpo.
“The market has felt the need – Torretta also said – to find shared points of reference and precise certainties that govern the relationship between the world of credit and that of construction, above all in the light of the very significant weight that the sector has in the Italian and European economy”.
"From 2007 to 2010, business credit fell by 25% for residential construction and 11% for non-residential construction. In the first 3 months of 2011 residential construction decreased by 11% and non-residential construction by 4% – he said instead George Gallesio, vice president of ANCE (National Association of Building Builders) – who underlined the main ones criticality of the relationship between the credit and construction sectors: “We businesses have not yet acquired a sufficient culture to best represent the business to the bank and the bank is not yet so prepared to judge it. In this sense, the existence of a guideline creates training: when a voluntary rule exists, it pushes the parties to adapt to it”.
Dialogue, albeit sometimes difficult, between different stakeholders is one of the strengths of the Uni technical standards, in particular of this voluntary self-regulation tool, still in the approval phase: “It is useless to deny the initial difficulties in putting all these subjects around the same table. The problem was above all in the distrust between the banking and business worlds – he explained Fabrizio Calabro Massey, coordinator of WG 13 Uni – Today I believe it has been far exceeded, to the point that Abi and Ance have signed their own memorandum of understanding in which they have even included this draft standard”.
Finally for Raffaele Rinaldi, head of the Abi credit office: “It is necessary that this Uni standard is implemented as a guideline rather than a straitjacket for the bank-company relationship. The bank cannot waive its discretion in the evaluation of projects. It is good that there are guidelines, we will instead agree less on an excessively binding codification”.
