Passera doubles down on SME-neobank model

While incumbent Italian banks have seen profits surge thanks to higher rates, the shrinking size and profitability of the non-performing loan market has hit illimity hard. Unperturbed, founder and chief executive Corrado Passera believes the original premise for an SME-focused neobank is more valid than ever.

You can’t avoid the troubling memory of Italy’s 20th-century history in illimity’s headquarters. The country is littered with weighty pieces of fascist architecture, and this is one of them. Sitting next to Milan’s central train station, it is a former logistics hub of the Italian post office, built in 1931 – “the ninth year of the fascist era”, as a huge Latin inscription on the outside says.

But illimity’s chosen location might merely underline how much the country has changed.

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