Endeavor

1 5 When Credimi founder Ignazio Rocco quit his consulting career of twenty years in 2015, he had his eyes on the fintech industry as a potential investor, not an entrepreneur. With his experience at BCG, and before as a banking professional, he developed a strong understanding of financial markets in Italy. His fascination with technology was more of a personal matter. He was a baby boomer whose childhood was marked by the experience of sending a man to the moon, and he always advocated for innovative tech solutions in his work as a consultant, but his expertise stopped here. As a first step, Ignazio began to study the best performing fintech companies of the time, such as Lending Club and Funding Circle, to learn about their approaches and growth strategies. He began to recognize patterns in their techniques, models, and know-how that closely tied into his experience as a banking professional. He realized there was a demand for the same services in Italy, and he returned to Italy with the resolve to start a fintech company focused on SME lending. The timing was perfect. At that point there was no other fintech lending firm in Italy, and no one else was trying to serve the enormous Italian SME market. The hardest part, he knew, was going to be to build the right team. Cognizant of his inexperience in tech, he began searching for a cofounder to complement the team. A friend introduced him to Jacopo Anselmi, a 27-year-old anti-abuse strategist at Google, and once he was on boarded, they convinced Sabino Costanza, a talented project leader at BCG, to become their third cofounder. Then, Ignazio left on a five-day trip to San Francisco and tracked down every qualified Italian expat he could think of to convince them to go back to Milan and join what was Credimi. He had a good case to make to them: they were going to build a truly collaborative company, and he allocated a correspondingly high portion of the company's cap table to prove that he was serious. At some point, he met with the Italian consul in San Francisco to convince him that it was in his best interest to help Credimi find the best Italian talent in town. Fundraising was a simpler matter thanks to Ignazio's connections from his previous career, but Credimi was going to need a lot of capital to navigate the strict Italian regulatory landscape. As a long term strategy, the team applied for a lending licence early on, which was going to be a costly procedure for a small company. So, instead of raising a seed round, Ignazio, Jacopo, and Sabino sought to raise 8 million dollars right away. For this, Ignazio gathered a coalition of outstanding angel investors, which included Alessandro and Mauro Benetton, Paolo Merloni, Lorenzo Pelliccioli, the Venesio family, owner of Banca del Piemonte, BCG Global Chairman Hans-Paul Bürkner, a number of Tikehau Capital partners among which Jean Pierre Mustier, who later became Unicredit's CEO (At that point, Mustier sold his shares in the company to avoid conflict of interest.), Giovanni Landi, Massimo Tosato and Dante Roscini, which then become President of Credimi. Credimi was launched in 2017. Two years later, it is the largest digital lender in continental Europe, and it is managing 700 million Euros in lending. In 2018, they raised 10 million euros in follow-on financing, one of the largest rounds in Milan fintech to date. Together with a number of other first movers, Ignazio helped found Italia Fintech, an organization to advocate for a regulatory framework that would ease the burden on young fintech companies in Milan. As today Credimi operates in Italy only, but the founders see an opportunity to expand their operations globally. C R E D I M I ' S F O U N D I N G S TO RY

• Cover