Insurance Daily | March 2024
The year that has just ended was exceptional for all banks: we witnessed a competition between bankers to see who could triumphantly communicate the achievement of the best profit ever.
All the banks – without exception – achieved – as they say among marathon runners – their personal best, i.e. the best personal time over the distance, achieving the best result ever.
A question arises spontaneously: but if in a marathon everyone improved their personal best, wouldn’t the path have been easier?
For the certification of a marathon route, there is an organization that establishes the average difference in altitude and the presence of curves: the time of someone who runs the Boston Marathon (among the hardest) cannot be compared to someone who covers the same distance along a straight downhill stretch.
There is actually a trick: with the cost of money skyrocketing, for those who, like the banks, have billions of customer money in cash, making money is child’s play between loans to customers (mortgages) and deposits in the ECB.
It is important to point out that there is nothing incorrect in all this, even more so considering that the banks, before the hangover from high rates, in the previous two years had to go through the gauntlet of sub-zero rates of the US banking crisis and the worsening of the geopolitical crisis.
The real issue is another, also hoping that the high interest rate situation will last until the end of 2024, imagining only some downward adjustments (– 0.5% in June) and that therefore the banks will be able to enjoy another exceptional year, what will happen next? Where will the banks’ profits come from with capped rates?
And here the biggest question ever arises: is it possible that in a country with a chronically under-insured population and with billions of savings deposited in interest-free bank accounts, there is no decisive and effective focus on protection and managed savings?
Rivers of ink have been written about why Italians don’t take out insurance; certainly, there is an issue of poor financial education, on which much can and must be done, but this is not the only barrier to correct financial and insurance planning.
The banking and insurance sector (if we want to make it unique) is, even if less than in the past, in debt of trust to the Italians, it requires new professionalism and certainly greater proactivity, all things that today seem to be rare commodities, if not in all, at least in most banks and insurance companies.
The real challenge for those banks and companies that want and know how to look beyond the short-term contingency, and therefore also the volatility of rates and markets, lies in having a medium and long-term strategy.
Banks that want to be successful in the future will have to look further in the direction of a sustainable and fair growth perspective for all stakeholders, which lies in uniting the three pillars that support Italian families and businesses in a single service model: protection, savings management and credit.
To do this, trained professionals are needed who know how to win the hearts, even before the wallets, of Italians, respecting everyone’s interests, customers first and foremost: from this point of view the road still appears long.
Nicola Ronchetti