How AI Is Helping Financial Services Companies in Italy Cut Costs and Improve Efficiency

Italy's financial services sector sits at a moment of rapid potential: European studies show most firms remain in the early stages of AI adoption, yet many IT leaders rank AI as a top priority and document processing has emerged as a high‑impact GenAI use case - about two-thirds of firms cite it as a lead application - what feels like automating a paperwork avalanche for banks and insurers.

Practical pressure comes from productivity and compliance: firms must balance efficiency gains with regulatory and governance work led locally (notably the role of the Banca d'Italia and OECD AI governance collaboration in Italy).

European benchmarks and IT readiness reports show training and clear governance are the fastest routes to safe cost reduction; for nontechnical teams, focused upskilling like the AI Essentials for Work syllabus - Nucamp Bootcamp helps staff learn prompts, tools, and practical workflows to turn pilot projects into measurable savings.

Italy's AI landscape is unmistakably a two‑speed system: a booming market - projected to nearly double from about €909M in 2024 to €1.8B by 2027 - driven by banking and telecom investments, yet small and medium enterprises remain behind the curve.

Reports show large enterprises adopting AI at much higher rates (around 24.1% in one estimate, and nearly six in ten large firms reporting at least one AI project), while SME adoption hovers in the low single digits to high single digits depending on the study (figures range from roughly 4.7% to 7.7%, with small firms often below 10%).

That gap matters for IT teams: banks are already funding process automation and predictive models - banking investments reported at about €173.6M - so IT roadmaps and cloud/data investments tilt toward scaling secure, compliant deployments, while regional SMEs still wrestle with costs, skills and uneven geography.

Practical steps for Italian financial IT include leveraging shared infrastructures, targeted upskilling and regulatory‑aware pilots so that smaller institutions don't miss the productivity upside that early adopters in banking and telecom are already capitalizing on (see the Anitec‑Assinform market forecast and analysis and the FIRSTonline coverage of the market surge).

Our goal is to amplify the voice of ICT companies that face market challenges daily. Their perspectives on frontier digital technologies, supported by data and empirical evidence, are a valuable asset for the entire country. To accelerate AI development, we need a strategy that integrates three key elements: fostering digital skills in education, enhancing advanced computing infrastructure, and strengthening public‑private partnerships.

Cutting costs in Italy's banks and insurers is less about layoffs and more about squeezing waste out of slow, manual processes: AI‑driven automation and RPA are already trimming back‑office bills by up to 50% and shaving processing times by roughly 30%, according to a recent Yooro snapshot of Italian banking innovation, and those headline gains show up in concrete IT projects - from automated loan doc workflows and contract templates to real‑time transaction matching and AML screening.

Practical Italian wins include RPA and ICR deployments that cut manual work by 70% at insurers and slashed wrap‑up times by 82% in contact‑centre fraud handling (helping teams hit service SLAs on thousands of alerts a month), while hyper‑automation and ML decisioning speed onboarding and lien searches so lenders can approve loans in hours instead of days.

For regional banks and SMEs, the playbook is clear: start with high‑volume, low‑variance tasks, pair bots with human supervision, and scale through cloud APIs and governance frameworks - see both the market overview on RPA use cases and hands‑on automation stories to map the first pilots for IT roadmaps.

Using Legito, we produce our documentation far more efficiently – greatly improving our speed, accuracy and control across the transaction lifecycle.

Italian banks and insurers are turning conversational AI into a competitive edge: from UniCredit's buddybank, which built a 24/7 in‑app concierge that consistently hits 95% CSAT and even arranged a tailor‑made costume delivery for a customer, to voice and chat assistants that resolve routine queries, speed onboarding, and free agents for complex advice - exactly the hybrid “human‑in‑the‑loop” model IT teams need to scale personalization without multiplying headcount.

Platforms that plug into existing stacks and support multilingual, secure flows let organisations deliver contextual, data‑driven journeys (balance checks, payments, proactive reminders) while preserving GDPR‑aware controls; see how PolyAI frames secure, integrated conversational account services and rapid deployment, and read the buddybank case for a real Italian example of conversational banking in action.

For regional banks and SMEs, partnering with local AI consultancies helps map pragmatic pilots, choose platform‑agnostic solutions and deploy Co‑Pilot tools that turn every agent into a high‑value advisor - so the customer who used a bank's concierge to fetch a last‑minute baptism gift becomes the poster child for what personalization actually delivers.

“Digitization and technology innovation play an increasingly big part in the banking sector; but as we all move faster than ever, we realise the need for meaningful human interaction – even with our bank.” ~ Claudia Vassena, Head of buddybank

AI is reshaping how Italian IT teams approach risk, AML/KYC and compliance by privileging safety and oversight over blind automation: designing human-in-the-loop AML/KYC systems for banking automation gives banks a practical way to automate repetitive screening while preserving supervisory roles for investigators, and privacy-conscious signal design helps turn customer data into usable signals without compromising consent.

Practical Italian deployments lean on privacy-safe personalization techniques (useful for identity verification and behavioral signals) described in the AI prompts and use cases for financial services in Italy, and they follow governance guardrails that national authorities are shaping - the Banca d'Italia–OECD AI governance collaboration is central to this approach.

For IT leaders, the takeaway is clear: build layered systems that mix automated triage with human review, embed privacy-safe signals, and align deployments with the evolving national guidance so compliance becomes a built-in feature, not an afterthought.

Italy's payments and capital markets teams are already piloting a powerful combo: AI for matching, reconciliation and compliance, married to tokenization and blockchain rails to make cross‑border flows faster, cheaper and auditable - Yooro's market snapshot even finds AI‑blockchain hybrids can accelerate tokenized securities issuance timelines by 75%, while real‑time on‑chain compliance rails cut reconciliation friction; at scale that means IT roadmaps can shift from batch exports to near‑instant settlement and continuous audit trails.

Practical experiments range from the STAI sandbox for tokenising real‑estate and alternative investments to a high‑profile digital bond where CDP and Intesa Sanpaolo issued a €25M blockchain bond with same‑day (T+0) settlement on Polygon, showing how tokenization lowers custody and settlement costs while preserving regulatory checks under evolving EU rules like MiCA. For Italian IT teams the takeaway is pragmatic: design privacy‑aware data feeds, plug ML services into smart‑contract workflows, and partner with sandboxed platforms to prove out cross‑border token rails without sacrificing compliance.

"This transaction demonstrates how public blockchains are a powerful technology for financial institutions, making transactions faster and safer. Tokenization is establishing a new standard for efficiency and automation in financial markets, and I believe this technological change will impact not only bonds but every asset class over the coming years," - Niccolò Bardoscia, Intesa Sanpaolo

Funding in Italy's financial‑services tech scene is maturing rather than exploding: landmark data shows Italian start‑ups raised about €1.1B through 628 deals in 2024, while 2025 so far reads as many more rounds but smaller checks - Q2 brought €227M across 104 rounds - so IT teams must design roadmaps for incremental scale rather than one‑big‑bet transformations; Milan remains the powerhouse for fintech capital, concentrating most regional investment and talent.

Institutional support and state vehicles like CDP Venture Capital are filling gaps, and foreign VCs are increasingly leading rounds, which helps plug experience shortages but also raises the bar on governance and milestones for founders.

The workforce effect is blunt: a shortage of managers with large‑scale build experience pushes firms to invest heavily in skilled hires and retraining for data, cloud and ML operations, while smaller banks and regional players must partner or source talent through vendor relationships to keep AI projects moving.

In short, the ecosystem is active and cautious - more dealflow, fewer mega‑rounds - so IT leaders should plan capital‑efficient pilots that prove metrics and unlock staged financing from both domestic and international investors (Chambers 2025 Italy venture capital trends) and watch the rising foreign interest that Sifted documents as a key dynamic shaping hires and exits (Sifted Italy midyear funding scorecard).

“For me, I don't really pay attention to whether our H1 this year was higher than last year or not… This is my main KPI: how many foreign investor‑led rounds above €5m‑8m are there?” - Stefano Onofri, cofounder of Cubbit (quoted in Sifted)

SMEs and regional banks in Italy encounter a clear “two‑speed” reality: while larger firms pour resources into ambitious projects, many smaller players remain experimental - ISMO finds only about 5% of SMEs actively using AI - so IT leaders must build pragmatic, low‑risk paths from proof‑of‑concept to production.

Start with high‑volume, low‑variance tasks (invoices, onboarding checks, chatbots) and pair off‑the‑shelf tools with incremental investments in data pipelines and governance rather than betting on costly one‑off systems; Andrea Viliotti's research shows SMEs frequently lean on ready‑made solutions but struggle with data quality and specialist skills, and that almost half of firms are already investing in internal training.

Practical steps for regional IT teams include launching pilot projects that prove measurable SLAs, creating cross‑functional squads or an innovation coordinator/CAIO to translate business needs into deployable models, and tapping national support (Confindustria Digital Innovation Hubs and the Ministry's Competence Centers) to share infrastructure and talent.

Above all, make data engineering and clear governance the first milestones - without clean, governed data, personalization and automation stall - while phased training and partner networks turn initial savings into sustainable efficiency gains (see ISMO's recommendations and the AI Corporate Culture study for concrete roadmaps).

"For the first time we can dialogue with a nonhuman entity, and we don't know what to expect from this interaction. Will we try to manipulate it? Will it try to manipulate us? We are in uncharted waters. Nello Cristianini"

Italy's next steps are pragmatic: IT leaders should align pilots to the national AI Strategy 2024–2026 - prioritising measurable back‑office wins, layered governance and human‑in‑the‑loop checks - while scaling through shared infrastructure and clear data pipelines so compliance becomes part of the build, not an afterthought.

With the market set to nearly double to about €1.8B by 2027 and a persistent SME adoption gap, the fastest route to impact is small, audited pilots that prove ROI, fold in risk management from day one, and pair platform choices with workforce reskilling; AlixPartners' playbook underscores training, cross‑functional centres of excellence and staged scaling as the winning pattern.

Practical options for busy IT teams include using regulatory sandboxes, embedding privacy‑safe signals for KYC/AML, and upskilling nontechnical staff via focused programs - such as Nucamp AI Essentials for Work bootcamp registration - to turn prompt‑level skills into operational savings and safer deployments across retail banking and regional finance.

Our goal is to amplify the voice of ICT companies that face market challenges daily. Their perspectives on frontier digital technologies, supported by data and empirical evidence, are a valuable asset for the entire country. To accelerate AI development, we need a strategy that integrates three key elements: fostering digital skills in education, enhancing advanced computing infrastructure, and strengthening public‑private partnerships.