Bcc: Azzi urges group leaders to listen more to the banks and to reflect on the cohesion agreement

(Il Sole 24 Ore Radiocor) - ‘Between a parent company organised as a public limited company, subject to ECB supervision, and BCCs that must remain – in practice, not merely in name – cooperatives with a predominantly mutualist character, a certain degree of friction is to be expected, which must be managed and overcome. This must be managed through a dynamic balance, in which the flow from above is matched by a flow from below. Today, the BCCs sometimes feel that this second flow is insufficient: decisions often arrive already set in stone, and dialogue takes place ex post rather than ex ante. Hence the call for prior consultation, where possible, on the most significant decisions, and for the federations to be valued as an already established channel for dialogue’. This was highlighted by the president of the Lombardy Federation of BCCs, Alessandro Azzi, during his speech at the annual conference currently taking place in Verona. Reviewing the key issues at the heart of the debate within the cooperative banking sector in recent months, Azzi went on to note that ‘operational standardisation and the distribution of costs’ are ‘perceived as penalising smaller banks, which are calling for a more consistent application of the principle of proportionality’. In this context, the cohesion agreement – which governs the membership of individual BCCs within the banking group – whilst “a sensitive issue to be handled with caution”, having “arisen in a specific historical context”, could, ‘now that the system has achieved stability, be the subject of reflection in order to better promote subsidiarity, proportionality and simplification’. Considerable attention was also paid during the conference to the topic of artificial intelligence. “There is no doubt that the governance of AI, like that of cyber security, must be placed at the parent company level,” remarked Azzi. ‘But whilst we can proceed swiftly with low-value-added activities, those closer to the heart of our profession require greater caution, models fed by data specific to our banks, and the ability to critically verify the results.’

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