MILAN (ITALPRESS) – Intesa Sanpaolo and AICCON Research Center have published the 13th edition of the Observatory on Finance and the Third Sector.Through a sample survey of 250 entities (social cooperatives, consortia of social cooperatives and LLCs qualifying as social enterprises), the Observatory monitored the status and evolution of supply and demand for finance for the Third Sector, focusing on three crucial issues of social entrepreneurship: relationship with banks, social impact finance and financial needs and future prospects.The analysis finds that collaboration between social enterprises and banks is highly satisfactory, with 86 percent of the sample saying they are satisfied with the relationship. Key factors in this satisfaction include the presence of dedicated and trained staff (34 percent) and the offering of specialized banking products (19 percent).According to the data collected, cooperatives and social enterprises perceive the bank not only as a provider of credit services to them (39 percent), but also as an entity with an accompanying advisory and network orchestrator role.In particular, it emerges how such collaboration between the banking system and Third Sector entities is urged in order to address specific social challenges that the pandemic biennium also confirmed to be urgent: employment of the newly fragile, including young people and women (34.5% of the ETS sample); the development of care and assistance services (32%); and combating youth educational poverty (19%).Banks can thus be an important partner for the Third Sector, as evidenced by 93% of respondents welcoming their direct involvement in addressing social challenges. However, only 5 percent of respondents to date actively collaborate with banks in this area, a gap between trust and active collaboration that indicates a real room for establishing an even stronger relationship with Third Sector organizations.The analysis shows an improvement in terms of knowledge of individual financial instruments, albeit with less use: 2 out of 5 organizations are familiar with social impact finance instruments, while only 1 in 3 use them or are interested in doing so. Of the known social impact finance instruments, the best known are subsidized loans (80 percent of respondents) and solidarity bonds/social bonds (52 percent); of less relevance are other instruments such as Venture Capital (37.3 percent), hybrid instruments (30.9 percent) and Pay for Success instruments (24.5 percent, e.g., social impact bonds).Impact finance instruments are closely related to the issue of measuring social impact, an issue that more than half of the responding organizations currently address (51.6 percent of the sample).Among the main motivations for conducting impact evaluation: reorienting activities in order to make them more effective (45 percent) and a useful tool for raising resources (29.5 percent), both of which are growing year on year.For the three-year period (2021-2023), 2 out of 3 organizations (67.6 percent) say they have made investments, a share that stood at 70 percent in 2020 and has been declining since then. There is a positive correlation between those who have made investments in the last three years and those who say they will make investments during 2024: 2 in 5 of those organizations that have invested in the past will, in fact, do so again in the near future, mainly with respect to strengthening their human capital (31 percent) and redesigning the services they offer (12.7 percent); in contrast, there is a decrease of interest in investing in access to technology, hardware and software (16%, steadily decreasing from 26% in 2020) In general, the 13th edition of the Observatory confirms the trend noted in the two previous editions regarding the investment decisions of cooperatives and social enterprises, which allocate more and more resources to short-term investment (+6.2 percentage points since 2020) than to long-term investment (-7 percentage points since 2020).Finally, the propensity to borrow from banking institutions seems to be proportional to the operating seniority of the organizations: just over 1 in 5 of the youngest organizations has applied for financing from banks in the last three years (21.1 percent), compared to almost 1 in 3 of the longest-lived (33.5 percent), up to 50 percent in the case of Cooperative Consortia, also in view of their more complex structure.For the fourth consecutive year, the Observatory is enriched with the Intesa Sanpaolo Outlook of the Social Enterprise, an analysis curated by Ipsos Italia and AICCON, in collaboration with and under the patronage of ConfcooperativeFedersolidarietà and Legacoopsociali and CGM, aimed at surveying sentiment, health status and future development prospects on a sample of 101 social cooperatives.Also from this report-which complements and complements the Observatory-emerges the importance of strengthening systems of collaboration and turning to the construction of a solid ecosystem among the main actors and operators in the social economy: Third Sector Entities, Public Administration and banks/financiers. In particular, banking institutions can also be a point of reference in the pursuit of the social challenges foundational to the mission of the social enterprises surveyed: the direct involvement of banks in future social challenges is considered consistent with the banks’ mission and therefore legitimate by 4 out of 10 enterprises surveyed, and for 1 out of 2 – although not consistent with its mission – it is desirable or could be helpful.The initiative confirms Intesa Sanpaolo’s role as an institution that wants to make a real social contribution to the community in terms of inclusion, enhancement of the environment and culture, and promotion of education and innovation. With the 2022-2025 Business Plan, the Group, led by CEO Carlo Messina, thanks to the establishment of the dedicated structure Intesa Sanpaolo per il Sociale, strengthens its goal of being a reference point in social sustainability, promoting the issues of inclusion and cohesion as part of its overall strategy.”As Impact Direction with our 600 people throughout the country, we are committed to providing nonprofits with increasingly innovative tools for relationships and collaboration,” says Andrea Lecce, head of Intesa Sanpaolo’s Impact Direction. “Our priority is to make sure that their projects grow, develop and improve, with benefits for the territory. We have estimated that one euro financed to the Third Sector generates twice the value in social benefits, so we want to continue to support it by favoring access to credit and correlating it to the impact generated to make its work even more visible. “The Observatory confirms the value of a relationship that, unlike in the past, cannot be oriented only to good management but rather to generating social impact. The world of social enterprise is called upon to co-produce together with PAs and businesses new solutions capable of combating the underlying causes of inequality. On this the Bank plays a decisive role as much in the financial sphere as in building an ecosystem of skills and alliances,” explains Paolo Venturi, director of AICCON. “The survey brings to light the new challenges facing cooperative enterprises, which have at their center the connection between human capital and technological innovation. A process of change that is functional not only for the development of cooperative enterprises, but is indispensable for the growth of territories, for the consolidation of social equity in our country, and for the social resilience of the local and national community. Hence the importance of a new pact between cooperative enterprises and banks, which is to be consolidated not only as a business and financial relationship, but also as a process of accompanying, by banks, the process of transformation and consolidation of cooperatives in our country. A social economy development pact capable of enhancing the role of connector and anti-social fracture that cooperatives have always played and that in the near future they will have to play more and more,” says Enzo Risso, scientific director of Ipsos, who curated the survey together with Barbara Toci, researcher at Ipsos.
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