Calabria in last place for counters and digital skills
This is what emerges from the indicator produced by Plus24 and the Sole 24 Ore Studies Office on the basis of Istat-Bankitalia data. The case of Mileto
3' min read
3' min read
Let us put ourselves in the shoes of a gentleman over 70 years of age who lives in the town of Mileto, 6,415 inhabitants, a municipality in Calabria with no bank counters. Mileto is in the province of Vibo Valentia, an area where there are only 59 automatic teller machines (ATMs) for cash withdrawals: this is the lowest number of ATMs of all the provinces in Calabria, which in turn is the Italian region with the fewest ATMs for every 10,000 residents.
Negative indicators
.An extreme case that of the gentleman from Mileto but useful to understand the difficulties of a region in last place in the four of the six rankings considered in this survey.
Digital skills, in particular, are the lowest in Italy, which already does not excel in Europe: only 32% of Calabrians, aged between 16 and 74, are adequately trained (data Istat-Bes). Consequence? The difficulty of accessing home banking: only 44 bank customers for every 100 residents use the service, and even in this case, Calabria is in last place.
Digital Desert
.Crossing the data on banking desertification with those on digital skills, it is clear that not all Italian current account holders, and not only in Calabria, can access a basic service such as current accounts. A dramatic situation of which the banking unions are absolutely aware. 'The situation in Calabria is truly difficult. In addition to banking desertification, there is the morphological structure of the territory,' emphasises Felice Simeone, the new regional secretary general of the Calabrian First Cisl. 'There are people who live in inland municipalities and have great difficulty accessing banking services. For example, there are municipalities such as Casali del Manco, in the province of Cosenza, with 10,000 inhabitants where there are no physical branches: it is the seventh largest municipality in Calabria.
How do you cope in such a situation? Especially older people, who are unfamiliar with using the Internet. How many kilometres does one have to travel to find an open branch?
