The “brick-centric” wealth of Italians and the distributional asymmetry of the banking system

Our country is, as a whole, a lover of “bricks”, and financial diversification is concentrated in the highest client segments. Savings professionals increasingly oriented toward wealth advisory.

by Manlio Marucci, president Federpromm

The world we know, albeit through periods marred by great inequalities such as the one we are living through now, has over time produced wealth and welfare in its overall balance, but in a profoundly disaggregated way in its distribution across the various social classes; wealth that today amounts in GDP terms to more than 110 trillion dollars, with a tenfold increase in the GDP valuation and a global available cash dimension of over 120 trillion dollars. These are significant figures, offering careful observers a dynamic picture of social, economic and political reality, capable of generating primary relationships for the exercise of power and for decisions that have a decisive impact on the welfare of individuals, families and businesses.

In Italy, according to official sources (Istat and Bankitalia), at the end of 2024 the reference population stood at 59 million people, distributed across 26 million households. The net wealth of these households amounts in total to around 11,700 billion euros, but 5% of them alone hold 46% of total wealth. In addition, 45% of this total wealth is made up of homes, about 8% in non-residential property (commercial), 14.7% in asset management, 12.8% in deposits (bank and/or postal), 13.4% in equity securities and holdings, 3.5% in bond securities, 3.3% in other financial instruments, 3.3% and 2.8% in non-financial wealth.

The picture outlined is certainly representative, and highlights how our country is “brick-centric”, with about 70% of households owning the home they live in and also second homes; while financial diversification, which has undoubtedly increased in the choices of investment instruments despite the considerable mass of available liquidity still sitting in current accounts (around €6,770 billion), is concentrated in the higher segments of the population. Also indicative is the latest wealth figure in asset management, published by Assogestioni, which shows that at the end of 2025 the UCITS (plus portfolio management) reached 2,636 billion euros.

Now, if we correlate these data with the phenomenon linked to the size of the banking system and the transformations it has undergone in recent decades, one can hypothesise that this wealth is managed by credit institutions and investment firms in an "asymmetric" way, and that the variables of the psychological and behavioural mechanisms of savers reveal differentiated levels of risk, to which a certain discontinuity in communication with clients and in the distribution policies adopted by the financial system is opposed.

In this regard, in a recent article by Prof. G. Santorsola entitled "The profile of the new bank" (Financial Community Hub), it is clearly highlighted how the ongoing process of digitalisation has radically changed the physical structure of banks and reduced the number of physical branches across Italy. In fact, since the introduction of the 1993 banking law to today, the presence of banking groups across the territory has fallen from 37,000 branches (1 branch for every 1,600 inhabitants) to around 19,000 branches (1 for every 3,100 inhabitants); all this as a result of digitalisation and the reorganisation of the banking/postal system and the strengthening of the role of the financial adviser, financial services agents and web platforms.

The very configuration of the banking sector’s offering has changed radically because of the rapid process of digitalisation of services. Open Banking, Open Finance and Artificial Intelligence are structurally changing the offering of financial products and services, bringing to the fore the primary role of personalised advice for families and businesses, which requires the necessary contribution of human expertise. The same applies to financial advisers, who are increasingly moving toward wealth advisory in order to “save themselves” from the fierce competition among distribution networks, now lacking commercial policies and strategies useful for finding new markets and capturing the considerable mass of available liquidity.