AideXa, the AI powered and data driven fintech promoted by Roberto Nicastro and Federico Sforza, has received its banking licence and will become Banca AideXa in June once the customary registration procedures are completed. The SME focused bank will immediately boost its support for customers and accompany the post-COVID economic recovery, offering new accounts and value-added services for entrepreneurs by 2022.
Banca AideXa is one of the very first SME-Challenger Banks in Europe to obtain ECB full banking licence. This will enable AideXa, which raised in June 2020 a record seed round of €48million, to better support SMEs that are about to fully exploit the impending recovery. Italy is Europe’s second largest SME market with seven million companies, exceeding 50% of GDP. However, in a PricewaterhouseCoppers (PwC) report, Italy was found to be one of the weaker countries in terms of Fintech activity, ranking 24th globally according to Findexable. This was in large part to a lack of investments, although in the past year this has changed.
Businesses are about to face a number of new working capital requirements: increase in turnover and receivables, reconstitution of inventories, the hiring of seasonal employees, the renewed participation in trade shows, investments in maintenance that can no longer be put off, etc etc and AideXa is ready to offering them “X-Instant” a 10-minutes answer, fully paperless, short term credit facility, now fully backed by the banking licence.
Banca AideXa, already partnering with traditional banks for the development of its business and credit intelligence, will not only boost its digital lending activity, but will also be able to widen its banking services to current accounts, State-guaranteed lending, credit and debit cards.
Finally, the banking licence will provide further stimulus to the organisation’s growth plan, which envisages the hiring of 100 professionals by 2022, especially in the field of technology: Artificial Intelligence, Fintech, Big data and IT.
