Foti (Fineco): 'Savers increasingly aware of the markets, the change is epochal'

"We are facing an epochal change in the behaviour of Italian customers, who are paying more and more attention to investments, becoming more aware and increasing their level of participation in the markets". Alessandro Foti is genuinely convinced: the sudden return of inflation and the consequent increase in the level of interest rates from negative to 4% is having the effect of a real wake-up call on Italian savers, even more powerful than the Covid emergency a few years earlier. And what he sees from his 'privileged' observatory, the CEO of FinecoBank and his almost 1.6 million customers,
is "a real revolution that the savings industry cannot but
take into account".

In support of his thesis, Foti is also ready to show Il Sole 24 Ore the concrete data relating to the brokerage business, whose revenues are constantly growing within the group and can be estimated at over 70 million in the first four months of 2024: a phenomenon that is intertwined in a double thread with the behavioural dynamics of Italian households and confirms new trends. Between the end of 2019 and the first quarter of 2024, the number of what Fineco defines as "active investors" has in fact doubled, i.e. customers who personally manage their savings by also operating through active forms
of trading.

"These are people around 50 years of age, who execute an extremely limited number of monthly orders, an average of just three per month, and for the most part, they combine investments made through brokerage with their existing relationship with a financial advisor," Foti points out, pointing out that this type of client now accounts for almost all the existing exchanges on the same platform (92%). "We are faced with an ideal bridge uniting the world of brokerage and that of investing," adds the manager, "and at the same time an outpost that signals well in advance the profound change in behaviour underway on the part of clients.

The basic idea put forward by Foti is that these two activities, from which companies such as Fineco derive a good portion of their revenues, are destined to travel more and more together: 'The same client,' he explains, 'will have an advisor to assist him, but will not disdain buying and selling on his own account instruments that will increasingly respond to watchwords such as transparency, efficiency and attention to costs. This is part of the more general discourse of the necessary evolution and adaptation of the asset management industry, called upon to "move towards a concept of advisory services, where revenues will therefore be increasingly generated by commissions paid by clients for this activity and to a lesser extent by retrocessions".

The choices made by Fineco's active clients - whose base grew by 20% from the end of 2023 to last March 2024, a change comparable to what happened between the end of 2019 and the start of the pandemic and an increase from 2020 to date of around 40% - also represent a litmus test for understanding the Italians' most recent investment orientations. In fact, the most recent data show a slight acceleration in equities and a more marked increase in ETFs. On the other hand, the flow of money towards the bond market, which had played the most significant role in the 'awakening' of savers since the end of 2021, thanks to the recovery in yields, is slowing down.