Best bank 2025: UniCredit
UniCredit considers itself the most shareholder-friendly bank in Europe: with some justification, as shareholder distributions rose to €9 billion in 2024.
Italy’s best bank in 2025 boasts a total shareholder return over the four years to end-2024 of more than 500%, including share-price appreciation, dividends and buybacks.
After 16 consecutive quarters of growth, 2024 was UniCredit’s best-ever year for profitability. Return on equity rose to 17.7% despite carrying €6.5 billion in excess capital. Interest-rate cycle aside, revenue growth in 2024 was underpinned by fees – up 8% year-on-year.
Despite its European ambitions, UniCredit shows it has a strong standalone story.“We’re being very disciplined and consistent on M&A because we’re only going to do it if it adds to a base case that is already a high bar,” chief executive officer Andrea Orcel tells Euromoney.
Recently, it has launched a new digital SME lending platform. “It’s a fully digitalised SME lending process, end-to-end, which we are piloting in Italy, and then replicate with minimal additional cost in 13 markets,” Orcel says.
One of the other aspects of UniCredit’s impact, meanwhile, is its move to reinternalise product factories in areas like asset management and insurance.
UniCredit’s onemarkets investment platform, three years after its launch, saw assets under management reach €14.5 billion in 2024, with internally managed funds rising from 14% to 31%. And in late 2024, UniCredit started the process to bring its life bancassurance business in Italy in-house: ending agreements with CNP Assurance and Allianz.
Orcel argues that UniCredit can continue to outperform in terms of shareholder returns. First-quarter numbers, which allowed the bank to upgrade its 2025 profit guidance, suggest he is right.
“Why are we performing better? Number one, because during the last four years, we redesigned the bank and extracted value from the organisation. We have empowered our people, framed by a common vision and culture and supported by redesigned processes and ways of working, such as the rebuild of our technology and data, and our factories. And those investments have yet to fully crystallise their value.”
“Number two, we’re still not finished with the transformation. Now we are focused on the front end: integrating and digitalising in full our omnichannel network, retraining our people, and targeting the chosen client segments with the right product and services. We’re making a lot of progress there.”
Over the next three years, UniCredit is investing €2.5 billion in IT. It also recently sealed a 10-year partnership with Google covering cloud migration and AI adoption.
Aside its excess capital war chest, UniCredit’s lines of defence against future shocks include maintaining €1.7 billion in management overlays for credit losses, and frontloading costs associated with its IT transformation.
Orcel says: “We are the only one to have those combined buffers. We are also the only one which is undergoing the second phase of a successful transformation. It provides a level of protection, and alpha generation, that no one else has.”
Best investment bank 2025: Bank of America
Through a series of impactful and innovative transactions, Bank of America strengthened its role as a key player in Italy’s investment banking landscape in 2024.
A key factor behind the bank’s success was its role in several transformational M&A deals. These included Brembo’s acquisition of Öhlins – the largest in Brembo’s history – and CDP Equity’s €400m capital increase commitment to support Fincantieri’s acquisition of a Leonardo business unit.
In equity capital markets, the bank acted as structuring global coordinator on Campari Group’s €1.2bn raise to fund its acquisition of Courvoisier – the largest M&A-driven ECM transaction by an Italian-listed company in over a decade.
Another area where the bank stands out is in secondary placements, having managed the €650m sale of Monte dei Paschi di Siena shares on behalf of the Italian Ministry of Economy and Finance.
Sustainable investing was a strong area of focus for the bank in 2024, supporting green and hybrid bond issuances across the utilities and infrastructure sectors, including A2A’s €750m green hybrid and Snam’s €1bn hybrid offering.
The bank also structured a €4bn sustainability-linked revolving credit facility for Snam – one of the largest ESG-linked credit lines globally in 2024 – designed to support the company’s decarbonisation goals, including Scope 3 emissions reduction.
Best digital bank for SMEs 2025: illimity Bank
illimity has made notable progress in small and medium-sized enterprise digitalisation by leveraging its digital-native model and a suite of technology-first platforms.
At the forefront of its strategy was b-ilty, the bank’s lend-tech platform tailored specifically for SMEs. The platform reached profitability in 2024 following a €5.8 million loss the previous year. This turnaround was fuelled by a 21% quarterly rise in customer loans, hitting €780 million, and a doubling of new business origination to €545 million compared to the previous year. The number of businesses using b-ilty surged to over 4,100 by the end of 2024, nearly double the figure from 2023, demonstrating the platform’s strong market resonance and scalability.
In addition, illimity’s open banking platform, HYPE, continued to demonstrate growth both in usage and financial performance. HYPE processed 161 million transactions in 2024, up 22% year on year, and recorded a net profit of €1.2 million after posting a €6.2 million loss in 2023. With its user base growing to 1.9 million, HYPE underscores illimity’s success in building a mass-market digital finance ecosystem that feeds into SME services.
To further support SMEs, illimity reinforced its strategic partnership with SACE in early 2024, launching the Garanzia Futuro initiative. This provides digital access to long-term loans of up to €50 million, guaranteed up to 70%, targeting innovation and digital transformation. In July, the bank followed this with two new securitisation programmes in collaboration with CrescItalia, allocating €200 million in financing via a digital platform, and particularly benefiting sectors such as agriculture and sustainability.
In another landmark collaboration, illimity joined forces with Apax Partners to launch altermAInd, an artificial intelligence-driven fintech venture. By transferring key technology assets and personnel into this venture, illimity registered another successful milestone in developing the SME digital ecosystem in Italy.
Best bank for ESG 2025: UniCredit
UniCredit has significantly accelerated its environmental, social and governance (ESG) momentum in Italy through a strategic blend of green finance, social investment, advisory innovation and education-led empowerment.
The bank’s ESG Corporate Advisory platform has been expanded with regional ESG specialists embedded across Italy, enhancing UniCredit’s ability to originate and structure sustainable deals. This effort is yielding tangible results: €11.4 billion in green lending and €6 billion in sustainable bonds have been originated domestically, alongside a rising ESG penetration index on assets under management, now at 58%.
The bank introduced eight new ESG products over the review period, targeting both corporate and retail customers. Notably, its flagship Mutuo UniCredit Sostenibilità Energetica enabled €146 million in financing for energy-efficient homes, while the new ESG-linked Finanziamento Futuro Sostenibile Plus offers businesses tailored sustainability-linked loans.
On the social front, the bank provided €6.7 billion in social financing to support microcredit, impact lending and underserved regions. In a landmark example of these efforts, UniCredit extended a €15 million social impact loan to Nuova Assistenza, enabling long-term care infrastructure development in underserved Italian regions.
Education was a key component of UniCredit’s social strategy, as was diversity and inclusion. Its banking academy reached over 204,000 participants in 2024 with free training on finance, sustainability and entrepreneurship, while gender inclusion initiatives like Conversazioni sul Denaro and the Women ONBoarding supported women across Italy.
Best bank for corporates 2025: UniCredit
UniCredit has overhauled its corporate banking franchise in Italy, moving from a siloed model to one that pairs relationship managers with product specialists.
This shift was visible in the large corporate segment, where bringing life bancassurance fully in-house has unlocked bespoke risk management and wealth transfer solutions that sit alongside traditional lending, deepening fee income while keeping risk tightly controlled.
The bank has simultaneously doubled-down on innovation-led small and medium-sized enterprises. Its UniCredit Start Lab, now in its 11th year, has screened 630 high-tech startups and scale-ups that together have raised more than €4.2 billion. Graduating firms gain curated investor introductions and access to the group’s corporate client network, positioning UniCredit at the centre of Italy’s venture ecosystem and seeding future commercial relationships.
In addition, the bank’s UniCredit per l’Italia programme, launched in 2022 to support businesses in navigating challenging times, has already channelled €35 billion of credit and advisory capacity since its inception. A fresh €10 billion tranche unveiled in 2024 targets small and micro-enterprises with blended financial, insurance and consultancy support, while a dedicated €5 billion Transizione 5.0 facility incentivises projects that curb energy consumption, aligning economic recovery with decarbonisation goals.
Environmental, social and governance (ESG) was another priority for the bank’s corporate segment. Specialist teams now accompany bankers across all Italian regions to originate and structure sustainable finance deals. A partnership with Eni’s Open-es platform extends that reach into supply chains: more than 29,000 firms are already benchmarking their ESG performance on the portal. UniCredit has also layered on an ESG-Score service developed with Cerved Rating Agency, allowing relationship managers to calibrate pricing and products to clients’ sustainability trajectories and to introduce external expertise where gaps remain.
Best bank for consumers 2025: Intesa Sanpaolo
Intesa Sanpaolo’s retail and commercial business in Italy – Banca dei Territori – remains by far the most important motor for the top five European bank by market capitalisation.
With 13.7 million customers in Italy, ranging from mass market to affluent, it is the main distribution channel for the group’s in-house product factories, notably insurance and asset management, which have helped drive its profitability and given it a better balance between fees and interest income than its peers.
The bank has an especially strong share of Italy’s mortgages, which is a key anchor product for the relationship due to its long-term nature; and Intesa Sanpaolo has been highly successful in encouraging these customers to keep multiple products with the bank, such as cards, insurance and investments.
“Cross selling of products like insurance and asset management is a way of protecting the relationship including for mortgage customers,” Stefano Barrese, head of Banca dei Territori, tells Euromoney.
“We don’t use price and normally we do not provide the most attractive offer in market from a pricing point of view. We attract customer with the quality of our relationship managers, the quality of the technology and a holistic approach in terms of products. That very strongly reduces the risk that a customer could move away from Intesa Sanpaolo. It is why we have more new customers coming to us than we lose, even in Italy where we have a high market share.”
Financially, 2024 was another successful year. Banca dei Territori’s operating income rose by 4% to €11.7 billion. Net interest income rose by 2% while net fee and commission income rose by 6% thanks to a good performance in the asset management division. Operating costs fell by 1.7% resulting in an operating margin of €5.2 billion, up 12% year on year and net income of €2.2 billion, up 16%.
Among the key developments recently has been an ambitious push to overhaul the core banking system through a partnership with UK financial technology company Thought Machine and using technology developed in its digital proposition, isybank. The latter has also helped protect the firm, especially in terms of younger customers, from the neobank onslaught.
Barrese says the benefit to customers of the new technology is speed, cost, easier access to new products and an integrated journey between digital and physical channels.
“In most cases, banks talk about omnichannel activity, but customers can interact with the bank in a single channel, without any contact between the channels,” he says. “In our case, customers will be able to start the experience on the app, and then seamlessly resume the activity in the branch or remotely with a human agent. That is key, because it increases the probability of executing the sale.”
