Dear friends of illimity,
2023 is the fifth year of operation of our Bank.
These have been turbulent years, but illimity has never stopped growing: we exceeded EUR 7 billion in assets and EUR 100 million in net profit.
We have often had to adapt to unprecedented market conditions, but have always remained faithful to our founding mission: to serve Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises operating in Italy. Also in this last year, the volume of loans that we disbursed to this fundamental component of the Italian economy grew sharply, increasing by 24%, even though the market was declining on the whole.
The mix of our assets changed, and the performing and back to performing showed gradual growth. All forms of credit were significantly positive: Factoring, Structured Finance, Acquisition Finance, Special Situation & Turnaround and Asset Based Financing.
The sharp growth in assets and profits was achieved while maintaining a low risk profile, a sound capital position around 15% and a sound liquidity position that came to over EUR 1 billion.
All of these was achieved while continuously investing in our two fundamental strategic drivers: our people and our ongoing innovation.
Our people, illimiters: there are already over 900, from 25 countries, 300 organisations and more than 20 different sectors. With them, we have reached new milestones, in line with the values that have formed our identity since our beginning. Thanks to our people, the illimity Group was recognised as a Great Place To Work for the fifth year running, and was ranked as one of the Best Workplaces in Europe for the third time.
Ongoing innovation: the strategic driver that is part of our DNA and permeates our entire organisation. Our next generation IT architecture, unique and lacking a legacy, has become a revenue centre, confirming our medium-long term strategy. We are increasingly integrating the potential linked to artificial intelligence into our processes, to put it to work for our customers and favour the productivity of illimiters. In the last year, we managed to monetise our technology also through our agreement with Engineering, which transformed our IT architecture into a new source of revenues and business.
We continued to allocate a portion of our profits to business initiatives that leverage our expertise without losing the focus on our core business, but with the goal of creating equity in addition to that generated by operations, thereby favouring further growth and shareholder satisfaction. The development of our tech ventures has continued according to plan, and we believe they will generate value for the Group over the medium-term: b-ilty which provides digital banking services for the smallest enterprises; Hype, the leading platform in Italy for retail customers; and Quimmo, proptech and the leading Italian player in real estate brokerage on the judicial market, which opened to the free market through its partnership with Coima.
For us, sustainability has always been a value as fundamental as growth and profitability. This is clear from the fact that it has always been at the centre of our strategies, processes and governance, as illustrated in detail in the Sustainability Report published along with the Consolidated Financial Statements. We have renewed our full endorsement of the United Nations Global Compact, which, for illimity, is a commitment to contribute to promoting the Ten Principles, through cooperation and partnerships between varies stakeholders, in addition to our endorsement also of the Principles for Responsible Banking, (PRB), one of the most important sustainability frameworks in the financial sector, in November 2023.
Our commitment has remained the goal we set on our first day: “earning profits while being useful”. We are a business, and our mission is to make profit to remunerate capital, but we intend to do this with the utmost responsibility, being useful to all those who stand by us in this process, who will continue to trust in us.
