UniCredit is the clear winner of Best Bank of the Year in Italy. Along with its landmark announced merger with Germany’s HypoVereinsbank, UniCredit has had solid financial results and a clear strategy to strengthen its client base.
The creation of a dedicated division to control costs and optimise processes allowed for increased efficiencies and contributed to grow shareholders return. The bank also redirected capital to higher return businesses and divisions, such as ‘new Europe’ and private banking and asset management. Commercial focus was put on higher embedded value products generating recurrent revenues, in order to lower volatility of the revenue stream over time.
Attention has also been dedicated to service quality with the objective of building trust in the client base and increasing client loyalty. In particular, service quality has been strictly monitored through several customer satisfaction surveys, and strengths and weaknesses of UniCredit’s business model have been assessed. This is instrumental to the design of new products and to the optimal product distribution.
