Dear illimity friends,
This year, illimity turns five, and thus, we present to you our fifth Sustainability Report.
In these five years, we have never stopped growing: our assets have increased year after year, now amounting to more than EUR 7 billion, and in 2023 our customer loans increased by 24% in a market context falling overall. Our profits have also always grown, exceeding EUR 100 million in 2023, keeping our overall risk profile under strict control. These figures demonstrate better than any words our determination to concretely achieve illimity’s commitment: earning profits while being useful to the community.
These years haven’t been easy or predictable and our illimiters have shown a great ability to adjust to completely unprecedented, often critical scenarios. We have never failed on our founding mission to serve the world of SMEs operating in Italy. In some stages, in our initial years, we worked with a greater weight of investments in non-performing loans, while now our focus is more on growth credit and company restructuring. We provide a comprehensive credit offering – from factoring to structured finance, to acquisition finance, to special situations and to asset based financing. In the non-performing loans sector, we no longer directly invest in NPL portfolios, while we remain highly active in asset based financing as well as operating in the asset management and servicing areas in the real estate sector, through our subsidiary ARECneprix. Funds managed through our SGR also exceeded EUR 500 million.
We have never stopped investing in our people - illimiters - over 900 people from 22 countries, coming from 20 different sectors, with an uncommon mix of skills and experience, brought together by strong shared values. Thanks to them, the illimity Group was recognised as a Great Place to Work for the fifth year running, and for the third time was ranked as one of the Best Workplaces in Europe.
We have never stopped investing in new technologies. With the advent of augmented and artificial intelligence, we are prepared, having set up an AI Task Force composed of illimiters who are working on implementing action plans to integrate artificial intelligence into our operations, with the goal of improving not only our efficiency, but also our ability to serve our customers and take best decisions. Today, illimity’s technology is not only a cost and investment centre, but has become an actual profit centre, as demonstrated by the partnership set up with Engineering in June 2023, which will enable us to fully make use of and further promote the market potential of several of our important IT assets.
In these years, we have allocated a portion of our profits to new business initiatives that can benefit from our skills and our technologies. These tech ventures - which do not take away from our core business in any way - are following their processes of growth in size and financials and, over time, will contribute to creating additional equity to develop the Group and satisfy shareholders.
In our process of growth, under the guidance of the Board of Directors, we have always been committed to integrating sustainability into company processes, targets and strategy, with steadfastness and determination. As a result, we have achieved important milestones. To mention a few: maintaining carbon neutrality and achieving emission intensity per FTE among the lowest in the sector, in addition to measuring financed emissions and integrating ESG factors into assessing creditworthiness and into the Risk Appetite Framework. In terms of social aspects, we have a gender pay gap below 5% and have confirmed our Gender Equality Certification obtained last year. Those results are reflected in the significant improvement in our ESG rating, which in 2023 improved further, ranking among the sector best practises in those areas.
The 2023-2025 Sustainability Plan, presented to the market one year ago, also strengthens our commitment to these issues, accelerating the virtuous process implemented up to this point, which reflects the founding principles of the Bank. We are also already working with all business, central and control structures to respond to the regulatory changes introduced by the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), which will be endorsed by Italy during the year.
We have also renewed our full endorsement of the United Nations Global Compact, which, for illimity, is a commitment to help promote the Ten Fundamental Principles, through cooperation and partnerships with various stakeholders. Last November, this was joined by our endorsement of the Principles for Responsible Banking (PRB), one of the most important sustainability frameworks in the financial sector.
The work done and result achieved in our first five years of life have built a sound platform on which to build illimity’s sustainable development in the next few years.
