Gruppo Cassa Centrale: digitalization and customer closeness

Success stories from our clients

Digitalizing without diminishing the importance of human interaction and the role of bank staff. This is the great challenge of digital transformation, felt particularly strongly by organizations like Gruppo Cassa Centrale, which have long placed one-to-one communication and the centrality of people at the historic core of their values.

Let’s take a step back. Gruppo Cassa Centrale is young, established in early 2019 as a Gruppo Bancario Cooperativo (Cooperative Banking Group) through the membership of 85 Banche di Credito Cooperativo (Cooperative Credit Banks), Casse Rurali (Rural Banks) and Raiffeisenkassen present throughout the national territory, with 1,500 branches. During the 2020 pandemic, although many bank branches remained open, many members and customers were forced to stay at home: so how could closeness be maintained while enabling digital channels? “Last year we found ourselves facing a situation that was unpredictable for everyone. The Group’s banks have always cared deeply about direct relationships with people, one of the cornerstones of cooperative credit. The services provided by the branches still had to be accessible to customers in compliance with government measures, which in some cases also affected how the relationship was managed, not always expressible through traditional physical presence. That’s why we asked ourselves: how can we contact customers who are used to having a physical relationship with the branch?” says Alessio Bonetti, Head of Digital at Gruppo Cassa Centrale Banca. With this need in mind, Gruppo Cassa Centrale turned to Intesa. The solution implemented involves a remote signing procedure using Qualified Electronic Signature (QES) and video identification of customers. “On the first day it seemed like an impossible challenge, but the service subsequently began to spread, generating concrete, practical value on one hand, and contributing to the broader evolutionary and cultural journey on the other,” Bonetti continues. A solution that therefore has all the advantages of dematerialization, ensuring regulatory compliance and adherence to formal controls.

The Group’s experience shows that digitalization can always find a place within any type of business, and not only that. It is also the example of a growing Group that has understood the importance of an open innovation approach in order to team up with the most suitable partners, managing, with the speed of a startup, to launch a digital service that had become necessary. Flexibility and collaboration are the key factors. Bonetti also points out that this digitalization project within the Group played a “trailblazing” role for other projects as well, and further contributed to spreading greater awareness of digital solutions: “Adding the digital perspective to a Group with a culture devoted to relationships is a result achieved step by step, demonstrating in practice that digital is not in opposition, but can be complementary and improving. The first project developed together with Intesa allowed us to understand that, despite being a Group with a strong local vocation, we can leverage digital services to add even more value to personal relationships.”