Matthew Del Fante, CEO of Poste Italiane, attended a meeting with City investors in London, during which he was interviewed by Bloomberg TV. During the interview, you discussed the company's growth strategy and the important transformations underway. He highlighted the success of the Deliver 2022 strategic plan, launched seven years ago, highlighting how investors have gradually understood the idea of building a multi-product platform. “Investors have begun to understand the idea of building a multi-product platform” explains the CEO. “Today we are demonstrating the benefits of our platform strategy. I found them much more informed and interested investors to our history and I think this has created good momentum for us.”
The importance of post offices
Del Fante then spoke about the differences of Poste Italiane compared to postal operators in other countries, attributing this to the "diversification of the business started at the end of the last century". He explained that this diversification included offering financial products such as government-backed postal savings and life insurance, followed by expanding into payments and becoming Italy's largest payment card issuer. “Then came the services for families: thepost office is everywhere in Italy and they are places where everyone can come in and buy household products and services like fiber, electricity and gas at retail.”
Post offices and the needs of families
Del Fante recalled that Poste Italiane's investment portfolio is low risk, mainly composed of fixed-rate government shares. “In our industrial plan – explains the CEO – the area in which we will grow the most is the one that satisfies the daily needs of families: payments, telecommunications, electricity and gas in terms of volumes. In terms of contribution to net profit, the lion's share is made by insurance and postal savings, which remains central".
Poste's future challenges
Del Fante then spoke about the future of Poste and what will happen in the next five years with the “The Connecting Platform” plan. There are two crucial strategic lines: one greater proximity to the customer through a relationship-oriented service model in financial products at post offices and a significant transformation in delivery operations: “Italy, unfortunately, has very low volumes of correspondence and this is pushing us to be more reactive than the United Kingdom, Germany, France and the United States”. This is due to historical reasons, “seven years ago there was a minimum number of electronic invoices sent by mail, therefore, in Italy there have been no paper receipts for seven years now. Italians do not use the post for personal or private reasons, unlike what happens in the rest of Europe.”
Del Fante noted the challenge of turning this situation into an opportunity, focusing on network improvement of Poste Italiane with a greater focus on parcels to remain competitive in the evolving postal market.
