B-ilty: characteristics and strengths. The interview of Carlo Panella by Fintech Finance

- by Joe Butler, FF News

illimity, the high tech banking group headed by Corrado Passera, has announced the launch of b-ilty, the first digital business store of financial services and credit for companies with a turnover of between 2 and 10 million euros per year, costing a modest €40 Euros per/ month with the first 3 months free.

The platform harmoniously brings together a diverse range of banking operations in a single ecosystem, tailored to service the needs of the individual businesses and sectors of the economy. b-ilty was created as a business store for banking, credit, and value-added services and covers the most widely used banking transactions including providing credit and debit cards and offering SMEs short-term credit, factoring to fund working capital, medium-term credit to fund investments, insurance cover to protect the entrepreneur and the business alongside many other products and services provided directly by illimity Group or qualified partners.

As businesses progress through inception, creation, and growth, there comes an inflection point at which a business owner wants everything they have previously experienced within a larger organisation, within their smaller organisation. Yet they are forced to split their time between working on the business and working in the business, and this is where BaaS (Banking-as-a-Service) comes into play, relieving business owners of this responsibility by offering to take care of these services at a fraction of the price.

Carlo Panella, Head of Direct Banking at illimity said "b-ilty represents something different in the banking offer, it combines the best of new technologies with a highly tailored proposal based on modern paradigms of use".

b-ilty is the BaaS offering of illimity but stands out as an offering born and conceived for entrepreneurs, by entrepreneurs with the digital platform being built on the basis of suggestions of hundreds of entrepreneurs. illimity envisages an eventual future of b-ilty as an "all-inclusive" subscription which "besides the evolved LendTech systems and experts in the sector - which will be increasingly added - b-ilty can rapidly analyse dozens of indicators that will gradually be adapted to the features of each individual economic sector and shared with customers", allowing for b-ilty to preserve their focus on quality over quantity as the service grows.

Panella also went on to highlight the real benefits of using b-ilty for these SME's, noting that 'b-ilty is also capable of undercutting the costs of P2P platforms which is of particular relevance in the changing macroeconomic environment in terms of rising inflation and interest rates. This is also of great benefit to small corporations as they are able to access credit solutions at much more competitive rates'.

Italy is currently ranked22nd among EU countries on integration of digital technologies. This is quite a low rating and could be explained by fears over a lack of security in certain digital platforms. With this in mind, securing the privacy of its users was paramount and so to ensure this safety and trust b-ilty- focuses heavily on "transparency, certain costs, dematerialisation, and disintermediation of the physical network".

Accompanying this focus is the ability for the head of each company registered with the service being in complete control of what information can be shared with internal workers and with external professionals, meaning those involved are only seeing what you wish them to see.

In an impressive breakdown of b-ilty's services Panella outlined all that was currently on offer with b-ilty, including 'all banking operations, regardless of their number, including transfers, both traditional (in Europe) and instant; an ATM card (the next EUR 3 per month); two credit cards (the next EUR 52 per year); and, of course, all fees relating to home banking services for unlimited users and with customised privileges for each account as arranged by the administrator, with all features available for the set fee of EUR 40 per month'.

Utilising the opportunities presented by PSD2 functionalities, b-ility further allows businesses to make a better use of other bank accounts, with the balances and movements of all a companies current accounts being viewable on the b-ilty platform. Furthermore, each company is able to carry out transactions on all its accounts from this platform.

The platform's fully digital and easy-to-use nature allows the entrepreneur, the CFO and the accountant to manage the business's finances each from their own office, a feature crucial to those businesses expanding in today's hybrid working culture. To add to the importance placed on each individual user with unique and specialised services being added and updated, illimity offers to each customer a clear Relationship Manager, as well as a professional call centre in Smart care, available 7 days a week.

When all-digital services are adopted by businesses it can often be to the detriment of the overall efficiency of a business, over-complicating matters and creating more problems than solutions but the community driven nature of b-ilty stands to separate them from the rest. To sum up b-ilty I shall leave the final words to Carlo Panella, Head of Direct Banking, 'Our promise is to be complete in an offer that is easy-to-use and fast in the answers, always ensuring the human touch'.