credit and liquidity, if you need to invest, do it now – Corriere.it

Born in 1955, Carlo Gherardi is a Bolognese entrepreneur who has made privacy almost a religion. In 1988 he founded Crif, a credit information provider and that choice turned out to be a very happy intuition. Today the company, of which he is the majority shareholder, president and managing director, commands the list of major European players (in close competition with Experian and Dun&Bradstreet) and considers itself the fifth world operator in the sector behind only the American battleships. Not happy with Crif’s successes, Gherardi has recently become, with 53%, the main shareholder of Nomisma, the Bologna-based economic research and consultancy firm that was founded in 1981 by Nerio Nesi and Romano Prodi. An operation that the president of Crif explains as follows: «We played the role of lighthouse keeper. There are about a hundred shareholders in Nomisma, I’ve seen things mature that I didn’t like, I thought it was right to intervene and secure it by increasing our stake. Nomisma has a great history and also has the right to a great future».

Nomisma and the olive trees

Crif has indicated only two members to the board of directors, its men do not hold operational positions and has however contributed to the appointment of Maurizio Marchesini, national vice-president of Confindustria, to the top. «We have carried out an operation such as what Americans define as corporate citizenship. After all, it is right that in certain phases of life one makes useful choices for the city one loves and for the territory». Another of these sorties – on a completely different field – was to take over an abandoned area on the Bolognese hill (at Varignana), restore the ancient village and the palace and create an agricultural resort alongside. «I have always dealt with digital businesses and I wanted to invest in something physical. So I became a farmer, I planted the tidy sum of 150,000 olive trees and I dedicate myself to their cultivation. They even gave me an honor.’ In Varignana, next to the oil plants, Gherardi also found the time to build a Crif campus and to give birth to Boom, an innovation pole for training and attracting talent.

Nomisma and the olive trees

In the words of its founder, Crif plays an important role in accelerating and fluidifying the real economy because if there is information asymmetry, operators end up having a short arm and not making the decisions necessary for growth. “It is so true that in fact the World Bank favors the creation and installation of credit bureaus in Africa precisely to stimulate the development of the continent”. Returning to Italy, however, how does Gherardi see the evolution of creditworthiness? «We have been coming for good years but today we are facing a clear deterioration. High rates, fixed salaries, less money available, worsened payments to companies. The truth is that monetary tightening seeks to counter inflation, but reduces liquidity and ends up influencing the future choices of banks in the field of financing”. And unfortunately, according to the president of Crif, the situation is destined to worsen. «To entrepreneurs I say: “if you have to invest, do it now, after the summer it will be worse”». In the United States, Gherardi sees a tendency for regional banks to limit funding and consequently expects the arrival of many liquidity clouds, “also because as soon as there is the smell of blood, deposits move from local banks to the big ». In Europe, the banking system is more solid, but there is still a contraction in credit due to the reduction in circulating liquidity. «This makes me say to the gentlemen of the ECB, who also have all the tools to decide, to increase rates if they deem it necessary, but also to increase liquidity. And as for investments, the worst thing that could happen is to stop digital. There is a need for Industry 4.0, Agriculture 4.0. They are fundamental choices for the future». In Asia, the economy is growing so much that the banking system is self-sufficient, according to Gherardi. It is geopolitical tensions that make the difference: China has an aggressive policy not only towards the West, but also towards other Asian countries. And this will be a further boost to the proliferation of reshoring policies. «In fact, I see a strong trend towards the return of production to the West from countries judged to be geopolitically complex and about which we no longer have any illusions. We need to invest in reshoring».

Businesses and families

If these are the broad lines along which credit will move around the world, what are the trends of the Italian market in detail? A novelty is the rise in the insolvency rate of companies, explains Simone Capecchi, executive director of Crif. «For heaven’s sake, it’s just a warning, but default rates have been going down for a long time. Since January 2023 we have seen a recovery, and even within an average that is among the lowest in Europe, there has been a reversal and it has reached 2 percent”. Today, the leisure sectors suffer the most and then logistics, transport and food, while the pharmaceutical sector enjoys an excellent outlook. Another ongoing phenomenon is that of the contraction of credit to businesses, estimated by Capecchi at 6% for individual companies and 2.4% for corporations. The trend is obviously due to the increase in interest rates, but also to the climate of uncertainty linked to the increase in the price of raw materials, especially energy. “After years of declines, rates have returned to levels that we can consider normal, between 2.5 and 4 percent.” The increases in Frankfurt also had an impact on households, particularly in the mortgage applications sector, where a contraction of 23.8% was recorded. Subrogations fell by as much as 57.2 percent. «Demand drops more than supply. Households can postpone spending and therefore behave in this way, businesses cannot do the same with investments. They can’t postpone them», says Capecchi. On bank balance sheets, rising rates are causing extremely significant gains: the accounts for the first quarter of 2023 are worthy of mention: at least 5 billion are estimated, three times as much as in the corresponding quarter of 2022. «But their performance does not derive only from this gain passive, but by a great push given by the pandemic to the digitization of processes and of the offer”. Numerous services can be accessed directly from the smartphone and personal computer, so it is no longer essential to physically go to the counter. To this must also be added a constant and continuous redesign of the organizational processes of the banks, aimed at improving the cost/income ratio, such as for example the contraction of the branches in the area (a topic which however entered the sights of the banking unions with a demonstration by the Uilca held last Thursday in Milan in front of the Lombardy Region).

Pnrr and Piccoli

Business investments, on the other hand, do not yet appear to be affected by the dynamics in progress. «Rather – argues Capecchi – the real game is played on the Pnrr, where in Italy on the one hand there are the big companies that are well followed by the banks. On the other hand, however, a large part of the entrepreneurial fabric is made up of SMEs, who often have no idea of ​​how the Pnrr works, how to access tenders and maybe win them. Here it will be essential to put in place tools and initiatives to help small entrepreneurs, a process that institutions, the banking sector and subjects such as our Crif must work on ».