HIGHLIGHTS: Andrea Orcel - CEO of UniCredit

Hi, everybody. Tune in to this short version of the podcast, which we do every Friday. For the long version, tune in on Wednesdays. Hi, everybody, and welcome to In Good Company. And today, I'm in this particularly good company because I'm here with Andrea Osel, who is also called the Ronaldo of Banking. Now Andrea has really left his mark on the European banking industry. He's now the helm of UniCredit and just so many exciting things going on in your business and in your life. So warm welcome. Thank you very much. I'm very happy to be here. What is the biggest challenge that the European banking industry is facing just now? Scale and transformation. I think they combine. Scale because without scale, you don't have enough innovation. You don't have enough, ability to invest in technology and in all the things that you should invest to then transform. And transformation because we tended to look at legacy banks on one side, fintech on the other side. We looked at them. We didn't consider them. But if you take the next five years five, seven years, they're gonna converge. And therefore, you need to ask yourself, can I offer the same level of client journey, the same level of client experience Mhmm? With the same level of efficiency, and beat them on what they don't have, which is the clients that we start with, primary clients. And secondly, the ability to deal with multiple products and complexity. Do we need stronger banks in Europe to make Europe more competitive? Look. The the parallel I always use is, if the industry, which we always talk about, is the engine, financial services, banks and capital markets are the gasoline. So now Europe has two things. One, it is trying to transform itself because we have never been faced with such a challenge in terms of the structure of our industry, the leadership of our products. I mean, if you go if you travel to Spain today or if you travel to Italy, I would say in Spain, it's an extreme. Most car dealers from European producers are empty, and most car dealers from Chinese producers are full. And so this, for us, is a shock as European because we had the leadership in that. And there are other industry where Germany or Italy or France had the leadership before that we don't have anymore. We need to transform that. In addition to that, if you take Europe in the last fifteen years, we've been always lagging growth of US and, China. And, we need that growth. So in order to do those two things, you need new policies, and then you need to finance them. And I think some countries feel that they can finance them as they have done so far through government budgets, but government budgets are not enough. They need the leverage of banks and capital markets and our investors to be able to do that transformation …