SME credit, the private debt market in Italy rises to 14 billion
Anthilia's analysis reveals a compound average annual growth of 54.5 per cent in issues since its creation in 2013 and 30 per cent over the past 12 months. Yields are around 7 per cent.
It is a well-established market, the value of which can be estimated in the order of EUR 14 billion, made up of instruments capable of raising important resources to support the development plans of SMEs and at the same time offering investors an average return of around 7 per cent. The Italian private debt sector is a world that is certainly on the rise, despite the partially contradictory data collected by Aifi (the association that brings together the Italian private equity, venture capital and private debt operators), whose mid-year snapshot showed a 21% drop in funding compared to twelve months earlier, and a 66% increase in lending.
This is confirmed by Anthilia, which carried out a census for Il Sole 24 Ore of debt securities, listed or private, and loans with a nominal value of less than EUR 100 million issued over time by Italian companies. The total amount recorded from the first structured instrument in April 2013 to 30 June last exceeds 13.8 billion euros: a dynamic that translates into a growth of 54.5% compound annual average and 30% if we look only at the last twelve months, originating over the years from more than a thousand issuers and through about 1,200 transactions, but which above all does not seem destined to stop.
Giovanni Landi, chairman of Anthilia Capital Partners, is convinced of this, and is quick to point out that the future development of private debt in Italy will be supported mainly by two structural macro-trends. The first argument concerns the demand for financial resources by companies, which currently exceeds the credit capacity offered by the traditional banking system. "There is an annual stock of at least 80 billion in capital expenditure," explains Landi, "that Italian SMEs cannot finance solely through credit institutions, which are held back by technical reasons linked to capital absorption or even pure risk assessment considerations.
Added to this theme is that of the generational handover, which characterises around 60% of Italian small and medium-sized companies: a process that, according to Anthilia's vision, "cannot be managed with private equity and banks alone, but which requires the presence of another market player, debt, capable of acting as a complement to carry out the operation". The private debt therefore acts in both respects as a complementary instrument, representing an ideal bridge between the world of bank credit, equity risk and the more evolved markets.
Demand-side aspects represent another crucial issue for the private debt market, especially in Italy, where there has often been less interest - from both private and institutional clients - than in other areas of Europe. Here, however, the element of returns comes into play, which must compensate for the premium linked to illiquidity and are therefore considerably higher than those of other public asset classes that are comparable in terms of degree of risk. For example, Anthilia points out that 95% of listed bonds in Europe offer a yield to maturity of less than 5%, with an overall average barely reaching 2.9%, which in turn can be compared to an average annual return for private debt in Italy that Aifi estimated at 7% in the first half of 2025.
