Prelios Innovation and UNIREC, Unione nazionale imprese a tutela del credito – the Confindustria SIT Association whose members represent 80% of the agencies and companies that offer credit management services – have signed a strategic partnership agreement to promote BlinkS, the digital trading platform for non-performing loans developed by the Prelios Group.
The platform will be presented to all UNIREC corporate associates, who, as providers of a wide range of services (from commercial information to loan recovery and purchasing), they will be able to decide whether to use it as sellers, buyers or transaction arrangers. Under the three-year agreement, the BlinkS Team will supply technical and operational assistance for on-boarding to the platform and operating start-up.
According to UNIREC data, in the five years 2015-2019, amounts assigned and managed by its associates have almost doubled (+80%), a trend that reflects Italy’s economic situation and represents a tendency that will be confirmed in 2020.
More specifically, in 2019 the total positions managed by associates amounted to approximately 132 billion euro, and consisted largely of unsecured credits with aging above 3 years; of these, 81% arose from bank or financial borrowings (loans and mortgages), about 11% from utility and telco bills and only 2.5% from commercial credits (hire purchase arrangements).
UNIREC’s Secretary General, Michela De Marchi, said: “We are a high-value-added industry investing increasingly in digital systems to improve service quality In the current conditions – where the numbers are rising fast – a capacity for innovation will be crucial to industry competitiveness. The agreement with Prelios Innovation, which has developed solutions to digitalize the complex credit management process and make it even more effective, is a move in this direction.”
“We are particularly proud of this agreement where UNIREC, which has approximately 200 associates, has chosen BlinkS as one of its partners,” said Gabriella Breno, CEO of Prelios Innovation, the Prelios Group's Fintech specialist. “For BlinkS the partnership with UNIREC is an extremely important qualitative and dimensional advance: it enables us to broaden our buyer base with the arrival on the platform of professional operators who have successfully completed our KYC process and are signatories of the UNIREC-Consumers Forum code of conduct. A further demonstration of the close attention Prelios Innovation pays to counterparty reliability and professionalism, as a guarantee for sellers and the entire economic system. Equally, the agreement enables us to put in place another piece in our strategy for the expansion of the platform toward new asset classes and new areas of the NPL world.”
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UNIREC – Unione Nazionale Imprese a Tutela del Credito is the Confindustria Servizi Innovativi e Tecnologici Association that represents agencies and companies who offer credit management services. Established in 1998, today it has approximately 200 corporate members for a total of almost 17,000 professionals, representing 80% of the Italian credit management market. The President of UNIREC for the three years 2018-2021 is Francesco Vovk.
UNIREC is a member of the Federation of European National Collection Associations (FENCA) and a founder member of the UNIREC-Consumers Forum, a permanent round table that has drawn up the only code of conduct recognized at European level, whose goal is to promote co-regulation and protection of consumers and the professionalism of industry operators. In addition to UNIREC associates, the UNIREC-Consumers Forum’s members include 8 consumer associations: Adiconsum, Adoc, Asso-Consum, Cittadinanzattiva, Federconsumatori, Movimento Consumatori, Movimento Difesa del Cittadino and Unione Nazionale
Consumatori. The Forum President is Marcello Grimaldi, who is also a member of the UNIREC Steering Council.
