Banca Progetto prepares to launch instant lending for consumer credit

Banca Progetto, the Italian challenger bank specialized in services for small and medium Italian companies and private clients controlled by Oaktree Capital Management, has signed a partnership with the fintech company Faire.ai and Fabrick, the Italian platform created to promote open finance, in order to launch a new instant lending service.

Banca Progetto, thanks to Fabrick’s enabling technology and Faire’s credit score, will develop a service for the provision of instant consumer loans according to the most modern and inclusive paradigms where age, origin, and territoriality are no longer the decisive factors but are replaced with spending habits and categories, as well as the trend of ratios between income and expenditure, which become the reference parameters. This will make it possible to open the doors to a democratic credit, based on rich and transversal information.

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Banca Progetto continues its investments in digital transformation

Banca Progetto, whose goal is to become a point of reference for small and medium-sized Italian companies and private customers, continues to invest in digital transformation, which is proceeding successfully. The bank works in an ecosystem logic with selected partners such as Faire and Fabrick to develop, thanks also to its AISP (Account Information Service Provider) license, new solutions that optimize operational processes and customer relations. Faire offers its partners the ability to provide loans to customers not considered by traditional models, reducing the risk of default and preventing over-indebtedness of the end customer who obtains a loan, thanks to the platform’s evaluations. Fabrick will provide its account aggregation service, which makes it possible to view from a single touchpoint all the transactions a customer makes on its different lenders.

“Our customers have the typical needs of this century’s consumers, in terms of timing and experience, needs that we are able to easily intercept thanks to the bank’s lack of legacy and our digital DNA. We are promoting and testing a strategy of integrated collaboration between innovative fintechs and the bank: the partnership with two fintechs such as Faire and Fabrick, born thanks to young and talented entrepreneurs, will allow us to develop a new way of providing credit, revolutionizing the traditional market of loans to individuals and responding to the needs of increasingly digital consumers,” explained Paolo Fiorentino, CEO of Banca Progetto.

Gianluigi Davassi, CEO of Faire, said: “The synergy between 3 players in the financial market as Banca Progetto-Faire-Fabrick, is a truly unique opportunity. This agreement allows us to offer a financial service of very high technological value on data provided by the open banking platform. Thanks to this close interconnection, we will develop and make available on smartphones an app that will instantly disburse credit on users’ current accounts, a technological and financial solution never seen before in Italy and Europe.”

Paolo Zaccardi, CEO of Fabrick, commented: “Banca Progetto has fully grasped the advantages that open banking brings in terms of expanding the offer. The partnership will allow it to bring to the market an instant financing solution and thus respond to the need, particularly felt in the current economic context, to access credit quickly with particular attention to the user experience of the final customer. We are particularly enthusiastic about this collaboration because it testifies to the validity of the ecosystem proposed by Fabrick: on the one hand the capacity of our platform, through which the service will be implemented, and on the other the important synergies that arise within our community Fintech District, of which Faire is part and through which we have begun to collaborate with them.”

Banca Progetto was founded in 2015 after Nuova Banca Etruria sold 54.212% of the capital of Banca Popolare Lecchese to the Oaktree Fund

With offices in Milan and Rome and a commercial network present throughout the country, the bank specializes in services for small and medium-sized Italian companies and private customers, in particular in salary-backed loans for private employees, state employees, public employees, para-public employees and pensioners and in medium- to long-term loans to SMEs. The bank disbursed €400 million to SMEs in the first half of 2020, up sharply from €250 million in all of 2019. In October 2020, Faire.ai cashed in a €1.5 million round from Banca Progetto. 

As a reminder, Banca Progetto has signed 3 other partnerships with: Digital On Things (DOT), a consulting company operating in the CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and data monetization world; Italian fintech Modefinance to adopt its risk analysis solutions to SME clients; Solutions to Enterprises (S2E), a business and technology innovation consulting company, leader in Information Security offering Security Advisory, SOC design, industrial security, ethical hacking and eDiscovery services.

What does Faire.ai offer?

Faire.ai offers a cloud platform that enables partner banks and financial institutions to provide instant lending, and this is made possible through open banking, which enables the retrieval of users’ transactional data. Artificial intelligence then comes into play at this point, allowing the user’s creditworthiness to be defined. Finally, the platform offers financial partners integrations via APIs for instant loan approvals. faire.ai expects to arrive at the end of the year with a team of more than 10 people and whose number is set to double by the end of 2021. In addition to growing in terms of headcount, the startup aims to expand into other European markets, starting with Spain.

Fabrick was founded in 2017 

The company was founded with the aim of fostering open banking, promoting the meeting and collaboration between fintech companies, large companies and traditional operators in the financial world, making available to them technologies, skills and services. It is headed by Banca Sella, which holds 80% of the capital. The rest is distributed among the partners-entrepreneurs who have gradually joined the project by contributing all or part of their company’s capital to the platform, becoming part of Fabrick’s management and corporate structure. 

To date Fabrick has integrated 97% of banking institutions into the platform and 198 are the counterparts that use the over 500 APIs published. Many use cases are already in production, such as Account Aggregation, Data Enrichment (PFM), Smart Banking, Payment & Collection Engine and Payment Initiation Service (PIS). The latter was launched in May 2020 by Illimity Bank.

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(Featured image by Tumisu via Pixabay)

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