Unicredit, possible new mergers for the future?
They call him the Cristiano Ronaldo of bankers because everything he touches turns to gold. Andrea Orcel is about to celebrate two years at the helm of Unicredit knowing that in 12 months the stock market value of the bank in Piazza Gae Aulenti it increased by 88% and 35% in 2023 alone. The shareholders – who not surprisingly voted in favor of a maxi-increase in salary that can go up to 9.75 million between the fixed and variable portion upon the achievement of certain objectives – they gloat. Yet something is brooding, slowly, and the fear of finding themselves as the orchestra of Titanic keeps the antennas up.
It is true that Italy has a much more solid system than that of other countries. It is true that on the horizon there are not great possibilities of seeing one looming Credit Suisse or even a Deutsche Bank. But the CEO of Unicredit was very clear in a recent interview with Messenger: we need to protect ourselves, we need to reach banking union, we need to proceed with aggregations to make the entire sector more stable and safe in the face of shocks which, with great probability, there will be in the near future.
About this, a lot has been written these days about Gae Aulenti’s moves. Reuters reported a rumor it would see Amundi e UniCredit in talks, with the possibility that the institute led by Andrea Orcel invests in the Italian assets of the French asset manager in the context of evaluating the options on the future of their partnership. This was reported by two sources close to the situation. A possibility that has been considered would see Amundi spin off the Italian operations into a separate company of which UniCredit would buy a stake, the sources said.
The other idea, relaunched by Tag43, is that Piazza Gae Aulenti can continue an alliance with Generali by exploiting the triangulation with Allianz. A rumor that would have triggered Matteo Salvini himself, saying that there would be foreign designs on Leo. According to Tag43, a complex operation would be under study that would like to reduce the weight of Mediobanca at Generali precisely by exploiting Allianz’s interest in the foreign activities of the Lion. For the moment we are in the field of fantasy finance, in the future … who knows. All without forgetting the possible backfire for Mps or the attempt to “gobble up” BancoBpm. We will see in the months to come.
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