E-banking in Italy ten years later the new economy illusion

While Italian banks have been noticeably slower to embrace the Internet than their US and European cousins, many of them have adopted in the last 5/6 years increasingly aggressive postures accompanied with huge investments in ICT. The national titans that emerged across the Italian retail banking arena saw in the Internet a low cost way to build incremental presence across Italy. At the same time, the Internet has also enabled the rise of the ’virtual’ bank . Unconstrained by a legacy ‘bricks-and-mortar’ infrastructure, these new institutions expected to deliver an higher value proposition targeted at the upper echelons of the market. Increasing customer awareness, aggressive new entrants and media hype would drive, according the forecasts, more customers on-line over the years. As a result, a substantial e-presence was considered a necessity for banks that wish to remain competitive over the next years, in terms of both returns and favorable stock market perception. By the way during last ten years, Italian banks counters have increased at a rate of 1000 units/year, while in last year Deutsche Bank has almost doubled his on-line clients, who are currently in a number of not too much lower than the one noticed for the entire Italian banking system. The online banking market in Italy is today at a crossroads. And Italian banks if asked about new investments in ICT to get competitive advantage use to answer back: “no more bets”. This paper tries to give an interpretation to this answer analyzing the recent past of the Italian market, the actual situation throughout the results of a recent survey, and the general relationship between ICT, innovation and competitive advantage.