You can’t avoid the troubling memory of Italy’s 20th-century history in illimity’s headquarters. The country is littered with weighty pieces of fascist architecture, and this is one of them. Sitting next to Milan’s central train station, it is a former logistics hub of the Italian post office, built in 1931 – “the ninth year of the fascist era”, as a huge Latin inscription on the outside says.
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But illimity’s chosen location might merely underline how much the country has changed.
The small and medium-sized enterprise-focused neobank is tightly linked with the character of its founder and chief executive, Corrado Passera. Around the turn of the millennium, Passera was chief executive of Poste Italiane. Shifting away from rail transport was one element of speeding up the mail system and making it more cost-efficient. Under Passera, Poste consequently sold the building that now houses illimity and other private-sector firms.
Passera, now 69, is better known outside Italy as a banker than a postmaster.
