Cerved joins the Fintech District and makes its data available to the community, the company announced last week during the event “Fintech District Community meets Cerved: welcome and new opportunities” hosted on the rooftop of Copernico Isola for S32.
“The one between Cerved and the Fintech District seemed to us a very easy and immediate marriage because we have a part of the DNA in common, the part of innovation, certainly, and that of credit” commented Valerio Momoni, Marketing, Product and Business Development Director at Cerved, recalling that “our information and services have helped over recent years to provide and monitor approximately 1,500 billion euros between commercial credit and financial credit”. According to Cerved “It is an immense sum but there is still more to come. We think we can contribute to the innovation fostered by Fintech District also through what we have already developed over many years of work on data and evaluations with credit purposes”.
The entry of Cerved into the Fintech District community is proof of how the values on which the community is based can bring real benefits to the entire Fintech ecosystem.
Marco Scappa, Head of Fintech District stressed that “even thanks to the contribution of Cerved, the Fintech District is growing and is respecting its mission to create an open, pre-competitive ecosystem in which new and traditional stakeholders, innovation producers and innovation consumers find fertile ground to collaborate and develop business opportunities”.
According to Scappa it is no coincidence that Cerved is among the first supporting partners of the Fintech District, “there are at least three specific reasons”. First of all, Cerved has long been open to collaboration with new players in the sector and recognizes the value of initiatives such as the Fintech District, as demonstrated by the financial investment and industrial collaboration carried out with SpazioDati.
There is also a reason linked to understanding of the market: Fintech contributes to financial inclusion and can help Italian SMEs overcome two historical weaknesses: low capitalization and excessive dependence on bank capital.
The third reason cited by Scappa is related to the specific market role of Cerved: “if data is the oil of the future, Cerved is an oil platform that extracts it and a refinery that translates it into information. Data is a scarce resource for new Fintech operators who often do not have it available even though they know how to use it. Cerved’s entry is also linked to the mutual benefit of this collaboration: fuel producer and combustion engine“.
Concerning “precious data”, Cerved provides interesting information regarding the size of the Italian Fintech ecosystem which is still quite small: about 50-60 million euros (2017). Italy is far from the UK, but also from France and Spain. Something is changing, however, and there are favorable conditions for the Fintech to take off. In Italy there are 68K SMEs with a very low or low risk profile and 52K of them have even ‘modest’ levels of indebtedness, so much so that they could increase it to 103 billion euros without compromising their risk profile. According to Cerved it is a significant amount, equal to 24% of assets, which if transformed into higher investments could generate a significant increase in the production capacity of small and medium-sized enterprises.
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