SACE will also be able to operate as a bank

Among the various measures announced at the end of yesterday's Council of Ministers, one represents an unexpected novelty. The ritual press release issued at the end of the meeting, in the legislative decree relating to banks and investments, also contains a chapter which says that "in order to strengthen SACE's activity in support of exports and the internationalization of the Italian economy, SACE may be authorized to exercise direct credit (i.e. a set up as a bank). This activity must be carried out with prior authorization from the Bank of Italy, in compliance with international, European and national regulations on the matter."
The provision was introduced by Minister of Economic Development Federica Guidi, who believes that in this way we can take a step forward towards increasing credit for companies that export and carry out other internationalization processes. SACE has not yet directly commented on the news.
The authorization to SACE, if it was not foreseen on the eve of the CDM, however, it does not take us completely by surprise. It is about natural and logical evolution of a path which our public insurance for foreign trade services has already undertaken for a long time, and has brought it to completely shed skin, from simple credit risk insurance on a few single medium-term transactions to credit promotion for all companies that carry out operations abroad, such as exports, FDI, development of sales networks, participation in promotional initiatives, etc. And in the interviews with the CEO of SACE Alessandro Castellano that we have reported on these online pages, the difficulty of not being able to directly disburse credit to Italian companies and having to go through the parent company Cdp or the banking system of our country shines through, unlike what happens in other European countries where there are already such Eximbanks.
It is, of course, a I'm taking the first step, but it will be long and certainly not easy. SACE will not be able to "bank" directly with the parent company SACE spa, which is in any case an insurance company and not a bank, and as such subject to the supervision of ISVAP and not the Bank of Italy. It will therefore have to set up a separate entity, which will exclusively exercise the credit. So let's imagine how many problems there can be in setting up a bank from scratch: how much capital to bring into it, who the shareholders should be and with what shares, how to recruit management, the precise mission of SACE Bank, the relationship with the other large national banks, and etc. We also consider that there are examples of this kind abroad, but not in Italy, where the banks born from the offshoots of the large insurance companies operate mainly in the private savings collection sector (through life policies, savings plans, other financial instruments) and not of business credit.
It will then be one difficult but important challenge, and for once let us be optimists: having seen how SACE has been able to deal with the problems of recent years, and the results it has obtained in a global market that is certainly not easy, there are all the premises to win it and to have one more tool to promote credit to the best Made in Italy companies.