Debitos expands footprint into Italy with Milan based branch
- Debitos takes up space at Milan’s coworking fintech Copernico hub, S32 skyscraper
- Francesco Paolo Bellopede will head up the Italian office with four new recruits
- Milan presence will help Debitos better serve growing Italian clients, partners and pipeline
Milan – August 31, 2022: Debitos, the leading secondary debt market in Europe, has expanded its footprint in Italy with a new branch in Milan, the first outside the company’s Frankfurt headquarters, with plans for a third office in the second half of the year.
Francesco Paolo Bellopede, Debitos’ country director for Italy, will lead the branch, at Copernico S32, the coworking fintech hub in Milan for start-ups and scale-ups, located at Via Sassetti 32. Bellopede will head a five-strong team in Milan, with new recruits expected to join Debitos by the end of the year.
Debitos’ proprietary technology has developed an online marketplace for pan-European secondary debt transactions. A consistent pipeline of credit transactions has been secured in Italy, through strategic relationships with banks and loan servicers, elevating the market to one of Debitos’ most prominent in Southern Europe for existing and future growth ambitions.
In particular, Debitos’ transaction pipeline accelerated through the strategic partnership with doValue, the leading loan servicer in Southern Europe, which led to the development of doLook, the pan-European online credit marketplace, in April 2020. The doLook platform allows investors to conduct due diligence, price negotiation and transaction closing on a loan-by-loan basis seamlessly between counterparties cross-border. Since its inception, doValue has sold more than €500 million gross book value worth of single and non-performing loan (NPL) portfolios via doLook platform with more than 600 new investors already focused on the Italian market.
Debitos has also expanded the credit products sold on its proprietary platforms, specifically unlikely-to-pay (UtP), to keep pace with emerging trends and open up to new transaction flows and specialised investors. In Italy, the growth of UtP loans is expected to eclipse NPL volumes in 2022 and beyond, which Debitos is ideally placed to create an online marketplace, attracting a broader investor base, creating more pricing competition for sellers and a lower bid-ask spread with investors.
“Opening a branch in Milan was a natural step for our business,” says Timur Peters, founder and CEO of Debitos. “Given the expansion of our business activities in Italy it was important to have a presence for our clients and to support our broader Southern European growth ambitions. Our strategic relationship with doValue is constantly growing and we are expanding doLook beyond Italy and Greece to other European countries. At the same time, our platforms are optimised to manage UtP loans, which we expect will emerge as a dominant new debt product in Italy and elsewhere in Southern Europe.”
“Italy and Southern Europe will be our reference markets for the growth of Debitos,” says Francesco Paolo Bellopede, Country Director at Debitos. “It is important for us to have a presence in Italy as we expect growing credit transaction volumes from Southern Europe from new banks, loan servicers and our strategic partners over the coming years.”
For further information
James Wallace, Debitos
About Debitos
Debitos is the leading European NPL transaction platform, established by Timur Peters in Frankfurt in 2010. The Debitos platform enables banks, corporates and funds to sell credit exposures on the secondary market in transparent auction-based online transactions. It digitalises the entire credit sale process which reduces disposal timing to between three to eight weeks and provides access to more than 1,600 registered investors. These benefits support price competition, competitive pricing for vendors, and providers investors with piecemeal purchase options, which helps to minimise the bid-ask spread. Since its inception, the Debitos platform has transacted more than 750,000 loans in online transactions across 16 countries.
James Wallace is an editor, journalist, researcher and corporate writer on economics, geopolitics, finance, real estate, private equity, aviation, infrastructure and technology. He co-founded CoStar News in the UK in April 2011, and now works for multiple media organisations and corporations across writing, research, marketing/PR and consulting. He is an aspiring psychologist.
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