Edited by: Marco Fortis
Il Mulino - February 2008

This volume is an in-depth review of the role of "Territorial Banks" in the Italian economy, which, as is known, is mainly based on a widespread pattern of small and medium-size businesses, often belonging to industrial clusters.
The purpose of the volume is to examine, within a historical framework, how these banks contributed to the birth of the mentioned local manufacturing systems. In addition, the current situation is analysed in the light of the recent mergers that brought to the formation of Intesa-SanPaolo and Unicredit-Capitalia.
Despite these developments, which further increased the size of the bigger national banks, territorial banks still play a major role in the Italian industrial clusters, also because cooperative banks themselves were involved in mergers (e.g. Banco Popolare and Ubi-Banca) that increased their sizes without impairing their local radication. Though the pattern of cooperative banks is still effective, the need has arisen to upgrade their governance system, especially for the bigger ones, to bring them in line with today's capital market profiles without undermining their specific characteristics.

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