The IOR detaches a 3 million “dividend” from Pope Francis and closes almost two thousand current accounts – Corriere.it

The IOR detaches a “dividend” of 3 million to Pope Francis. The Istituto per le Opere di Religione has decided to allocate about a tenth of the profits recorded last year to the Pope’s acts of charity. Moreover, 2022 was profitable for the Vatican bank which increased its profits by 64% compared to 2021, almost 30 million in net profit. Thanks above all to the asset management activity which yielded commissions of 18.1 million on assets of over 2.8 billion. Over the years, the IOR has launched 16 funds that invest in shares, currencies and bonds of states and companies that respect the principles of the social doctrine of the Church.

IOR funds

The asset management division is undoubtedly the most profitable for the IOR which does not instead carry out the most typical of banking activities: credit. The granting of loans is limited to advances on salaries and pensions to its customers, i.e. almost zero-risk loans, granted at low rates and in limited numbers. The majority of the institution’s uses consist instead in the deposit of sums with other banks and in the purchase of sovereign and corporate bonds. These investments have yielded a return of 0.91% to the IOR, while the remuneration granted to the 1.8 billion euro deposited by customers stops at 0.10%. On this difference, the bank built an interest margin of 22.6 million, up 3.7% compared to 2021 but light-years away from that obtained by traditional commercial banks following the abrupt rate hike by the ECB .

Declining customers

The IOR cannot have as its first operating principle that of the maximum possible profit, but rather those compatible with the norms of morality, coherent efficiency and practices which respect the specificity of its nature and the exemplarity due in its operations, it had on the other hand underlined in 2015 Pope Francis, launching a reform of the bank after years of scandals. A renewal, still underway, which led the institute led by Gian Franco Mamm to close several accounts in 2022 following increasingly frequent and granular periodic checks. The number of customers thus fell in one year from 14,519 to 12,759. The selection will continue in the future with the aim of keeping only the deposits of people and institutions that have a close relationship with the Holy See and the Catholic Church.