Advisor | February 2025
Italy is a beautiful country; we live longer on average and we are surrounded by wonders: 75% of all the artistic assets existing on the globe are concentrated in our country.
As is known, we are also a nation of savers – the financial wealth of families is over 5,200 billion Euros – but terrible managers of our savings: we keep over 1,570 billion Euros in liquidity in our current accounts.
Going forward at this rate, the per capita wealth of Italians will become increasingly thinner, in fact the French and Germans have surpassed us in terms of per capita wealth, despite starting, especially in the case of Germany, at a significant disadvantage.
And this is thanks to the fact that our cousins from beyond the Alps manage their savings more carefully.
The causes are known, we Italians are a people in love with brick and mortar and government bonds, but by observing the world of financial consultancy – the most virtuous case in the Italian financial panorama – we discover that people are at the center of the choice to invest.
The evidence of the numbers alone is not sufficient: if an Italian family had invested (for example 100,000 Euros) in the global stock market thirty years ago, today they would have more than tenfold their investment (over 1,170,000 Euros).
We need people (savings management professionals) who explain it to other people (savers), we need to listen and talk, and it is more necessary than ever, as in any human interaction, to have understanding and empathy.
It is surprising that these very banal principles do not find application in the reality of the facts.
Yet the recipe is simple, it would be enough to segment customers not only by objective variables (sociodemographic and financial) but also by subjective and behavioral ones, linked to their attitudes towards money management, projects and, above all, the type of interlocutor best able to help them on this path.
The empirical evidence resulting from FINER research confirms that with a few questions capable of mapping each individual on two dimensions such as the level of autonomy/delegation and the greater or lesser self-confidence in managing their savings, we are able to identify different types of customers.
On the other hand, it would be equally useful to segment professionals (financial consultants, private bankers and bank managers) by their work style based, for example, on the level of proactivity with respect to customers and autonomy with respect to the bank.
By crossing the two analyses, perfect pairs would be established, where for example a more proactive professional would be associated with a more dormant client and vice versa a more protagonist client would be associated with a professional more inclined to play a supporting role.
To convert Italians’ liquidity into managed savings, first of all the supply chain – especially banking – must wake up and pick up the phone: we think that as many as 77% of customers with an average balance of two hundred thousand Euros in liquidity in their current account have not heard from their bank manager for over a year.
And then there needs to be a person on the other end of the phone who empathizes with the potential investor, and it’s not just a question of chemistry, they’re called elective affinities and they are measurable if only you wanted to.
To paraphrase a historic advertisement from a well-known telephone company, we could say that sometimes a phone call can save not only the life but also the savings of Italians.
Nicola Ronchetti