It is hardly surprising that an Italian bank should excel at lending to small and medium-sized enterprises, which are the backbone of the industrial strategy of the country. SMEs are at the heart of UniCredit’s UniCredit per l’Italia strategy, which has seen a further €10 billion of support extended to individuals and corporates this year – including a special assistance package for Emilia Romagna in May in response to widespread flooding.
The bank, which has a 20% share of the SME wallet in Italy, launched two further initiatives in December, approving €200 million of loans and €100 million of minibonds for SMEs under the Fondo Centrale di Garanzia scheme. The bank also eliminated point-of-sale fees for merchants with turnovers of under €1 million for transactions up to €10 carried out at physical sale points in a one-year initiative that ran until June 2024.
“SMEs are at the core of our strategy,” explains Stefano Chiarlone, head of finance Italy at UniCredit. “Our extensive network gives us a deep local presence to nurture the close client relationships that we have developed for years. Leveraging such connections, we offer SMEs high-quality products and solutions, developed by our internal factories, that are seldom provided to them by other players. Moreover, we have further improved our service model to SMEs, also including dedicated support in measuring and improving their ESG [environmental, social and governance] performance.”
The focus on SMEs extends to the wider group in Austria and Germany. In the latter HypoVereinsbank has entered a strategic partnership with SAP to offer its automated working capital analysis integrated into SAP enterprise resource planning systems. This will provide clients with tailored data analyses relating to working capital optimization.
The bank has also formed a strategic alliance with embedded lending provider Banxware, which offers platform-integrated financing to SMEs, in order to make credit solutions for smaller businesses more flexible. In December 2023, Banxware announced its Series A financing round with €15 million in equity from UniCredit, Fabrick and existing investors.
SMEs are at the heart of UniCredit’s UniCredit per l’Italia strategy, which has seen a further €10 billion of support extended to individuals and corporates this year
Marco Iannaccone, member of the executive board of HypoVereinsbank and head of client solutions Germany at UniCredit, explains that this segment has been surprisingly robust amid the volatility of recent years. “Smaller clients have been very resilient against, for example, interest rate rises and the war in Ukraine. It surprised me how quickly SMEs have been reacting,” he says. “For them it is a matter of survival.”
UniCredit launched a significant enhancement to its ESG proposition for SMEs in March last year, the Open-es partnership with ENI, which will support SMEs in measuring and improving their ESG performance. UniCredit acts as a value chain leader partner in the Open-es alliance, which provides a digital platform to track sustainable development. The bank has structured a customized solution to measure the ESG profiles of clients and generate an ESG score based on a methodology provided by Cerved Rating Agency.
“We are more global than local banks and more local than global banks,” Iannaccone explains. “Smaller clients need payments, trade finance and acquisition finance; and at this level you are competing with regional banks. We are trying to get a level of service in, for example, advisory and the energy transition to the smaller corporate segments where locals and regionals simply can’t compete. The cost to serve needs to be more efficient, so we are developing more and more digital tools and can pair SME clients with experts within regions.”
