Fintech is dead, long live fintech. The direct lending platforms – those that collected capital from investors and passed it on to businesses and individuals, bypassing the banks, or even seeking alliances with the banks – were convinced that they could do better than the traditional system. Faster, more digital, more efficient. For a few years the numbers seemed to prove them right and in particular during Covid. Then came the credit cycle, rates rose, defaults appeared, and the house of cards collapsed. In Italy as in Europe, in Europe as in the United States.
The problem wasn’t technology. He was the model. These platforms took on credit risk without having either the capital or the structures to manage it. It was inevitable that they would lose.
For those arriving on the market now, like Klaro, a second generation fintech, the lesson is clear. “Our strength is technology – Andrea Mignanelli, who has been president of the company since March 2026, tells The Signal – we use it to solve the problem underlying the lack of credit for businesses, especially small and micro ones: information asymmetry. We let the banks do their job. We give them the tools to do it better”.
The Basel constraint that throttled credit to small businesses
Table of Contents
To understand why this model is relevant, we need to take a step back and look at the regulatory framework. European banks operate under Basel constraints – a system of prudential rules that require capital to be set aside in proportion to the risk of loans granted. The riskier the loan, the more capital must be tied up. And microbusinesses, by regulatory definition, are in the highest risk category.
It’s not necessarily because they are bad or struggling businesses. It’s because banks can’t value them accurately enough. In the absence of reliable data, the statistical model classifies them in the worst category, and the cost of provision rises. Lending to a microbusiness becomes structurally inconvenient, even if that same business pays taxes in order, pays suppliers on time and has a healthy cash register.
“The problem is not the will of the banks,” explains Mignanelli, who has seen credit evaluation models in circulation for thirty years in his past as a consultant between McKinsey and Cerved. “It’s a data problem. If you don’t have reliable information on the counterparty, the model tells you that it is risky, and the capital to be set aside goes up. At that point the operation doesn’t add up: it’s regulatory mathematics.”
This is exactly where Klaro comes in. The Klaro Profile – the certified document that the platform generates by integrating the company’s banking, tax and contribution data: public data taken from open sources – is not just an operational tool to speed up the investigation. It is, to all intents and purposes, a regulatory risk mitigation tool. Providing the database with granular, updated and certified data on the financial position of a microenterprise can change the risk classification and therefore the convenience of the operation. “If a company demonstrates that it regularly pays VAT and contributions, has constant collections and disciplined cash flow management, that is not a high-risk company,” says Mignanelli. “But the banking system didn’t know, because it didn’t have the data. We provide it to them.”
Italy, first in the world on business data
The value of Klaro therefore lies entirely in an algorithm that collects, analyzes and synthesizes public data from companies. There is a structural element that makes Italy the ideal context for developing this model. Klaro is based on the integration of two digital infrastructures: open banking, regulated by the PSD2 directive, and the digital tax system – made up of electronic invoicing, tax drawer, interoperability between financial administration databases.
Northern European countries are further ahead on open banking. But Italy is at the forefront on digital tax infrastructure. Electronic invoicing has also been mandatory for micro-businesses since 2019 and has created, as a side effect, one of the most complete and up-to-date archives of economic data on businesses on the continent. Every B2B transaction, every tax payment, every contribution position is recorded in real time in a digitally accessible system.
“The intersection between open banking and tax drawer creates a dataset on the company that has no equivalent in Europe,” says Mignanelli. “France, Germany and Spain are building similar infrastructures, but with delays of years. This gives us a real competitive window to develop the model in Italy and then export it.”
The business model: the value of technological infrastructure and scalability
Taking advantage of this Italian specificity, the Klaro Profile is built: a document that drastically reduces the operational cost of the banking investigation and improves the quality of the risk assessment. “But the Profile is only the trigger – says Mignanelli – Once created, the entrepreneur has free access to the complete platform – a treasury management system that monitors cash flows, collections and payments in real time, integrating them with tax and banking data. After the trial period, anyone who decides to continue activates a subscription worth around six hundred euros a year”.
The revenue model is therefore recurring, based on the ongoing relationship with the company, not on the single transaction. It is a SaaS logic applied to the microbusiness financial market – a segment that until now had never had access to tools of this type. On the banking front, the proposed value is threefold. “Reduction of the cost-to-serve on the investigation, which goes from twenty-thirty days and four-five hours of operational work to a much faster and standardized procedure. Improvement in the quality of the risk, thanks to granular data that allows a more precise evaluation. And, third, access to a market that was previously unattainable: three million companies that do not file financial statements and which today are de facto excluded from the banking circuit”, says Mignanelli.
“For banks this is not just efficiency. It is market expansion. We are talking about millions of businesses that generate value, that need credit, and that today the system is unable to serve”
The model that banks have been waiting for
If we go deeper into the analysis, it is clear that the major innovation brought by this model is in the governance of data – data that already existed but were dispersed in different systems, not interoperable, updated discontinuously, and above all not shareable without the informed consent of the company. “The paradigm shift lies in the access mechanism,” explains Mignanelli. “We do not collect data from outside. The company itself shares it, in a direct and controlled way. It decides what to share, with whom, and for how long. The bank receives the information with the guarantee that it is correct and updated. The company maintains control over its privacy”.
It is a model that reflects a broader trend in the data economy – what goes by the name of “data portability” and which is at the center of the European regulatory debate, from the GDPR to the Data Act. Klaro applies this logic to business credit: no longer the bank that collects data on the company, but the company that shares data with the bank, in a transparent and verifiable way.
A three billion market, a seventy-five billion gap
The potential market numbers are hard to ignore. Three million Italian companies in the target range, an average value per customer estimated at around one thousand euros per year, for a total potential market of around three billion euros. But it is the second number that measures the real systemic impact.
Between 2014 and 2025, bank loans to Italian small businesses fell by around seventy-five billion euros – a forty percent contraction in a decade. Not because businesses have gotten worse. But because the regulatory constraints have become more stringent, the evaluation models more standardized, and the information gap between banks and micro-enterprises has never closed.
If even just a part of this evaporated credit were to return to micro-businesses thanks to a more precise risk assessment, the impact on the real Italian economy would be enormous – and almost impossible to measure in traditional macroeconomic models, because it would pass through millions of small investment, hiring and growth decisions. “It’s not science fiction,” says Mignanelli. “It’s what happens when you solve an information problem on a large scale. Credit wasn’t missing for deep structural reasons. It was missing because the system didn’t have the tools to evaluate who was entitled to it. Those tools are now there.”
First-generation fintech wanted to disintermediate banks. The second generation one wants to strengthen them – it’s a different bet, less romantic, but much more solid. And for once, banks and startups seem to want to play the same game.
