Transaction services are a vital part of UniCredit’s rationale as a pan-European bank, and its leadership in this area is particularly evident in central and eastern Europe, where the bank’s regional head of transactions and payments is Riccardo Madinelli.
The Italian bank was voted market leader for CEE financial institutions in Euromoney’s 2023 cash management survey. Now, through its new group payments solutions division, UniCredit is focusing on group-wide harmonization, ensuring best practices are deployed across the network, so that clients in Slovenia get the same service as those in Milan.
Last year, progress in this effort included rolling out the automated UCPayFX solution for corporate clients and micro-businesses in the Romanian retail sector, allowing access to more than 100 currencies. The next stage will be to launch the service in the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
UniCredit has also expanded its payments partnership with Mastercard in what the latter said was the first time any large commercial bank had put in place a single card multi-market strategy of this scale in Europe.
Clients in six countries in the region can use its software point-of-sale solution, SoftPOS. As part of the SoftPOS rollout UniCredit helped Czech delivery company PPL with a cash-on-delivery solution. Other payments and cash-management developments include a new digital document exchange platform available in Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia.
UniCredit is focusing group-wide harmonization, ensuring best practices are deployed across the network, so that clients in Slovenia get the same service as those in Milan
In trade finance, which UniCredit has merged with its working capital sales teams, the bank implemented e-signatures in Romania, Czech Republic and Slovakia to help simplify guarantee issuance. It also transformed its back- and front-end infrastructure in Bosnia and Bulgaria, helping to boost digitalization of client flows.
UniCredit says it has now completely digitalized its working capital services. After introducing web-based factoring platform eFactoring.bg in Bulgaria, for example, UniCredit provided working capital support to an international pharmaceutical chain. As part of this Bulgarian mandate the bank says it offered a €12.5 million factoring frame limit, with over 80 debtors active in the factoring transaction and over 30,000 invoices digitally assigned and financed every month.
