Sonia Sirletti Milan
UNICREDIT’S finance chief and the most senior woman in Italian banking, Marina Natale, would like to run a company.
“My ambition is not only to be a technician working behind the scenes,” Natale, 52, said. “In the future, I’d like to try the role of chief executive. It would be easier in a bank, but I don’t rule out a challenge outside the banking sector.”
Her statement of ambition, unusual for an executive, comes at a time when women have made few inroads into the top management of European lenders. The only woman leading a major bank is Ana Botin, who took over as chairwoman of Banco Santander from her father when he died last year.
Natale said she did not plan to challenge her boss, the 59-year-old Federico Ghizzoni, who has been UniCredit’s chief executive since 2010.
“There’s no doubt that Federico will be reconfirmed as chief executive… as shareholders have said,” she said. “This post is likely too big a position for me to fill at this time.”
Potential
Ghizzoni said he relied on Natale for frank feedback to help him set the bank’s strategy.
His predecessor, Alessandro Profumo, said Natale sometimes took too much work on herself, limiting her visibility outside the firm. He said she could rise higher in commercial banking or become an investment banker or the chief executive of a family-owned manufacturing company. “Rarely have I seen her fail to reach a goal she’s set herself.”
Natale, a 27-year veteran of the bank, has been the chief financial officer since 2009.
Promoted in 1997 to lead mergers and acquisitions and business development, she worked on some of Europe’s biggest banking deals, including the e19.2 billion (R254.2bn) acquisition of Germany’s HVB Group and its units in 2005 and the e21.9bn takeover of Rome-based Capitalia two years later.
Takeovers transformed UniCredit into the largest bank in eastern Europe and one of the biggest in the euro area. They also left the company short on funds when confidence in banks collapsed the following year.
Troubles
After record profit in 2007, earnings tumbled, culminating in a e14bn loss in 2013 – the largest by an Italian company – on write-downs and mounting loan losses tied to Italy’s economic malaise.
“The expansion was too aggressive,” Marco Elser at investment bank Advicorp in Rome said.
Profumo, ousted in 2010, is now the chairman at Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena, Italy’s third-largest bank.
Natale stayed as the chief financial officer and set about shoring up the bank’s finances.
“The error we both blame ourselves for is that we weren’t able to predict the crisis, which hit us when we were still in an expansion phase,” she said. “In hindsight, we should have been stronger in capital and liquidity.”
Natale sold covered bonds, or debt backed by mortgages kept on its balance sheet, in 2009, the first Italian banking chief financial officer to do so. She also repurchased securities, including asset-backed debt, to cut financing costs, and raised e1bn of capital by selling additional Tier 1 notes in September.
UniCredit passed the European Central Bank’s asset-quality review and stress test last year, and profit was in line with the bank’s e2bn target in 2014.
The stock has more than doubled from the nadir of e2.2 touched in the depths of Europe’s debt crisis.
Natale has recently been preoccupied by Russia, where the bank has expanded to have among the largest exposures among European lenders. The rouble’s devaluation reduced the bank’s capital buffers in the fourth quarter. – Bloomberg