As 2025 is getting closer to the end, Italy’s Central Bank (Banca d’Italia) is wrapping up the state of the local fintech ecosystem.
Financial entities located in Italy have jointly invested over €1 billion in fintech innovations over 2023-2024, expected to splurge around the same levels in the ongoing two-year period (2025-2026). This number is even more notable considering that good half of the non-supervised Italian fintech companies are small in size (have fewer than ten employees), which is not typically associated with high budgets.
In its latest surveys published late December, Banca d’Italia is summing up the state of the adoption and investment in innovative technologies by both Italian banks and non-bank intermediaries, as well as provides a detailed picture of non-supervised Italian fintech companies. What are their main takes?
Young, Niche and Increasingly International: Typical Portrait of Italian Fintech Players
According to the study findings, almost half of the independent fintechs in Italy are recently established and small, therefore, also significantly relying on self-financing. Non-supervised fintech firms in Italy tend to be concentrated in Northern Italy, the part of the country home to financial centres such as Milan, Turin or Trento, as well as established tech parks, incubators, locations of frequent fintech events and networks.
Remarkably, more than half of local companies can be classified as “Full Fintech,” meaning they dedicate 100% of their staff exclusively to fintech activities. To be even more specific in creating a typical Italian fintech image, the majority of the startups focus on the B2B niche. That means, they work predominantly with banks, merchants, marketplaces, PSPs, and various enterprises, providing acquiring, POS, card issuing, payment processing, gateway and orchestration infrastructure. Some of the well-known Italian firms dealing with different B2B fintech services are Nexi, Modefinance, SpazioDati or Blockchain Italia.
Another notable feature of a fintech startup in Italy is its urge for international expansion. At present, 83% of companies surveyed by the Italian banking regulator have either already launched or are planning to launch a strategy to enter foreign markets within the next year.
Expansion is facilitated by the vast experience of the local fintech staff. About 60% of personnel have more than five years of experience in the sector, and predominantly illustrate profiles with technological-scientific or economic backgrounds.
Aims, Goals and Ambitions of Italian Fintechs
Besides clear expansion objectives, Italian fintech companies display a high degree of interconnection, collaborating with supervised intermediaries, other fintech companies, and technology firms. This closely-knit network is sharing widespread attention to innovation with social and environmental impact. Actually, almost one in two operators is currently engaged in ESG-focused “Fintech for Good” projects.
As most part of local fintech players are technology providers, supplying tech services aimed at supporting and improving activities in the financial sector, increasing process efficiency, and optimizing customer experience through advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), big data, and DLT/blockchain, it is no wonder that they invest significantly in those rapidly evolving tech innovations as well.
At the same time, the largest share of €1 billion investments in innovative technologies, reported in the 2023–2024 two-year period, was made by banks. A relatively small number of intermediaries is next in the spending concentration line. However, at least, the innovation investments nationwide remain stable, despite any turbulence that may be faced by a startup ecosystem in a challenging funding environment. Over 2025-2026, investments in innovative technologies by banks and non-bank intermediaries are forecast to remain practically unchanged, with a modest 1,4% growth envisioned by experts.
The share of projects based on cloud computing and generative AI (GenAI) is increasing today, fueled by generous investments in the field and promising market results shown by representatives of these technologies globally. Thus, compared with the 2023 survey, the value of equity investments in technology firms increased from €1.1 billion to €1.8 billion. Most of this growth is driven by the rapid development of AI-powered services and related infrastructure.
Which Fintech Activities Are Most Popular in Italy?
Overall, Italy’s fintech landscape is driven by infrastructure, enterprise services, and process innovation rather than purely consumer-facing apps. The most active fintech operations in Italy are concentrated in payments, credit intermediation, and operational support for financial institutions. Together, these areas account for almost all fintech initiatives in the country, although the weight of payments is gradually giving way to solutions aimed at improving internal operations and efficiency.
The technologies most widely adopted by the Italian fintech ecosystem in 2025 are web-mobile platforms, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and APIs, with strong growth in cloud-based projects and generative AI, while interest in APIs and distributed-ledger technologies is easing.
Online customer acquisition is now still widespread, showing how firmly digital channels are embedded in the market. At the same time, fully digital lending and deposit-taking remain limited. There’s a great area for improvement in this respect, considering that deposits held in accounts opened digitally account for only 5.1% of total deposits at the end of 2024. Besides, the ratios of digital loans to total loans granted to households and businesses are also only 10.6% and 1.2%, respectively.
Collaboration is another key characteristic of the Italian ecosystem: fintech firms, technology providers, and supervised intermediaries frequently partner to introduce innovative solutions, without a single dominant player.
Where Italian Fintech Firms Apply Most Innovations
As we see concentration of fintech investments around AI and cloud tech, the areas where those and other innovations are applied are also limited to few main segments. Mostly, Italian fintechs and financial institutions are trying to improve customer experience and the efficiency of internal processes, as consumer expectations grow and shift, and existing IT infrastructure becomes obsolete only too quickly.
AI, especially generative one (GenAI), is increasingly central to enterprise innovation initiatives, particularly in operational activities and credit intermediation, helping automate internal processes and simplify operational workflows. It also helps enrich the range of digital services offered to customers through increasingly capable chatbots that recommend products and provide advisory and assistance services.
The use of innovative technologies in anti-money-laundering is strengthening too, especially for identity verification, where digital signatures and digital identities are predominant. Transaction monitoring and analysis of suspicious activity reports supported by AI and big-data analytics tools are also on the rise.
Crypto-assets, by contrast, remain marginal to Italian fintech digital strategies. One of rare examples of Italian crypto players is Conio – a Milan‑based fintech that launched one of the first Bitcoin mobile wallets in the country and has since expanded its digital asset services to include custody and support for multiple cryptocurrencies. The firm has also recently partnered with Ferrari on launching a digital token for its exclusive club members.
Obstacles to Modernizing Operations in Line With Latest Tech Developments
Unfortunately, the wide availability of innovative technology doesn’t automatically lead to its mass implementation. Even those firms that can afford modernization face unexpected hurdles on their way, not to mention smaller firms with tight budgets.
Next to financial constraints, the main obstacles to implementing digital strategies continue to be the difficulty of finding qualified personnel and the low interoperability between new technologies and legacy systems. Thus, relevant digital skills among intermediary companies, whether at the board level or across general staff, are still not widespread. In particular, medium-high AI skills are present in only 3.4% of financial intermediaries.
The impact of new technologies on consumer inclusion and frustration is dubious. On one hand, continuing to use traditional channels to contact operators and maintaining human interaction in automated processes helps mitigate the risks of financial exclusion. Nevertheless, the risks of financial exclusion for users with low digital skills, or of discrimination against more vulnerable segments of the population, do not always appear to be adequately taken into account when firms arrange their digital strategies. After all, dealing with automated processing of user queries frees up lots of time for human operators and money for the company, which can then offer chat support 24/7/365.
The governance of digital strategies appears more structured (with coordination, reporting, and control mechanisms) among intermediaries with the largest investments. Therefore, in many cases, transformation remains fragmented or inadequately assessed. Only part of the operators use Key Performance Indicators to monitor digital transformation success, focusing on indicators that measure customer engagement and digital revenues.
Unlike many destinations on the global map, Italian regulations do not seem to be an obstacle to local firms’ growth. In fact, most companies involved consider regulation to be rather an opportunity to develop their business. The areas viewed as most relevant concern data protection, payments, and anti-money-laundering.
Bottom Line
As 2025 comes to a close, Italy’s fintech ecosystem shows a strong focus on B2B services, infrastructure, and process innovation, with banks and non-bank intermediaries jointly investing over €1 billion in technology solutions such as AI, cloud computing, and web-mobile platforms. While online customer acquisition is widespread, fully digital lending and deposit-taking remain limited, and crypto-assets continue to play a marginal role, with a few exceptions like Conio. Despite all advances, challenges persist in talent availability, interoperability with legacy systems, and ensuring digital inclusion, although firms increasingly view regulation as an opportunity rather than a constraint.
