Lorena Pelliciari (FinecoBank): la modalità di gestione dell'area finance

I bring my experience in my bank, and in my area in particular, in the CFO area, 50% of my direct reports are women. They are women and they have exceptional qualities: they are prepared and professional, they are attentive to risks, sometimes more than men. It is a female characteristic, and they are very attentive to particulars, to details, which I believe is a fundamental requirement because often it is the details that make the difference. Within the bank overall, 46% of total employees are women, so I have respected, indeed I have outperformed the female average. And gender diversity is a KPI within sustainability, to which within the bank we pay a lot of attention.

As for the second point you asked about, that is data management. Obviously, data for the CFO area is the daily bread. Data says everything because, speaking of the CFO, of the competencies but especially of the responsibilities, especially in a listed company towards the market, where it must present data that must be correct, timely, transparent, comparable over time, and must allow those who read this data, i.e., investors, the public, and clients, to understand exactly what the bank's results were and what the prospects might be. Obviously, data management continues to increase, data is always more, and management is very complex. In this sense, for example, yesterday Paola Perna gave a great insight: it is not enough to have the data, you must also know how to tell it, you must know how to manage it towards stakeholders and shareholders in a way that can be understandable to everyone.

That is, knowing how to tell the data, but to know how to tell the data, you need to represent it externally, but also to know how to read it internally. For us, data must always be easily readable. Data can say many things, but you need to know how to interpret and read them. You need to dedicate time to this. So data must be looked in the eye, you need to dedicate time to data, and not waste time in extracting and processing data, which unfortunately sometimes happens. So in our CFO area, we have focused heavily on data automation, therefore on technology. We believe that those who work in this area must also have technological skills. They do not need to have the skills of an IT manager, of course, but they must know the fundamentals of technology, because managing an ever-increasing number of data, if you don't have technology to support, I'm talking about business intelligence or blockchain that is coming, and we need to understand well what support it can give us. Obviously we have limits. In this sense, we talked about blockchain, therefore about the future, because blockchain at the moment is an emerging technology still to be understood, and we, as Business International of Milan, are trying to understand it through a series of conferences and meetings.

Yes, I believe that the finance area, within the finance area, there are the skills to be increasingly creators of value within the company. Generally, there are technical skills, because if you don't have technical skills you cannot work in the finance area. Business skills are also needed, because this is also a fundamental requirement. You must be very careful to be focused on the new, on the evolution of innovation, innovation especially from a technological and sustainability point of view. We obviously hope that these suggestions and these insights will be increasingly taken up by the finance directors of Italian companies.

Thank you.