A new broker arm of UniCredit
has been formed, focusing on general banking products. Antonio
Fabrizio discovers that the company is increasingly concentrating
on the international market.
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Italy’s UniCredit Leasing is
in the middle of ambitious plans to reorganise its distribution
strategy.
The objective is to create an
improved, multi-channel business which will focus much more on the
banking network of the UniCredit Group.
In the first phase of the new
project, the lessor’s broker channel – better known in Italy as the
“agent” channel – is being divided up into those which sell
UniCredit’s full spectrum of products, called group agents, and
those which sell only leasing products.
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By GlobalDataThe group agent project started
earlier this year, with a pilot scheme of six agents. It will end
in June, and will subsequently be extended to the overall network
of agents, so that it will be fully operative by the end of the
year.
Jacopo Benucci, UniCredit Leasing’s
head of global sales, said the group agents channel would offer “a
wider spectrum of banking products, including credit cards and
mortgages”.
The part of the business
exclusively sourcing leasing deals has, since January, been run by
Fineco Leasing, a subsidiary of the UniCredit Group.
Brokers are at the heart of
UniCredit Leasing’s business in Italy, and those who deal with
Fineco are so integrated into the lessor’s culture that they are
called UniCredit Leasing brokers.
“The agents are the originator
channel and have a good relationship with the customer,” Benucci
said. “They are also experts in the assets, and this is the real
value of good agents. It is a better service for the people who
need to be advised on the specific and special assets that they
need to lease.”
Making good use of
resources
The lessor’s new strategy also
means that, like a number of other bank-owned lessors across
Europe, it now makes much wider use of its parent banking
network.
“The corporate and retail bank
branches of UniCredit Group will distribute leasing as an
additional product for our customers,” Benucci said.
“At the end of the day, this is a
cross-selling effort to provide a wider spectrum of products –
including mortgages, credit cards, factoring and pure loans –
alongside leasing.”
The cross-selling business was
already in place before, but not with such a unified approach.
The company now intends to make
banking its “preferred channel” because, as Benucci puts it, “we
believe there is a sole customer base for our group, and we want to
be able to offer them the whole spectrum of services via a single
entry point”.
Meanwhile, its direct channel, in
which it sells leasing though its parent bank’s 112 branches – of
which 17 are in Italy – will focus more on larger customers and
major leasing transactions.
The company also plans to expand
its vendor business. Although the vendor channel is well developed
abroad – and includes such partners as BMW, Cisco and MAN – it
could still grow a lot in Italy, Benucci said.
Develop the vendor
business
“We are now starting to develop the
vendor business in the Italian market, but we start from very
strong international relations that already produce a lot of
business,” he said.
Indeed, the multichannel project
will include best practices from the lessor’s Italian as well as
European businesses, and the new strategy will be deployed all
around Europe.
Despite being a unified strategy,
Benucci said that the strength of each channel will be different in
each country.
Currently, only half of UniCredit
Leasing business is done in Italy, in which broker agents have
historically provided more than 70% of the company’s business. This
is set to change once the new scheme is fully operative.
The other half of the business is
in Europe and mainly in the CEE region – where, despite the crisis,
according to Benucci, the growth prospects in the long term
continue to be good.
Its banking channel is strongest in
Germany, Austria and Poland, and local branches already represent
the main source of business for leasing.
Bulgaria, Czech Republic and
Slovakia have a stronger focus on the vendor business.
The new distribution strategy will
include a larger emphasis on its international leasing capability,
Benucci said.
“We have a leasing department that
is focused on international transactions. For example, if a
German-based company wants to do a leasing transaction in Romania,
where they have, say, a power plant, we are able to put the German
company in connection with our Romanian business,” he said.
He said that the lessor can then
evaluate that customer directly in Germany, without any need to
check again its creditworthiness and quality in Romania, and can
give them the possibility and access to financing “with one single
interface”.
Benucci added: “The same approach is for the whole spectrum of
financial products, so it will be cross-country, cross-product and
cross-channel. This will give a huge advantage to our customers
because they’ll have one single point of services dedicated to all
their needs.”
