By Giulia Segreti
ROME (Reuters) -Italy’s antitrust authority said on Thursday it had opened a probe into the transfer of thousands of Intesa Sanpaolo customers to the bank’s mobile-only service Isybank.
The national competition watchdog is looking in particular into how Intesa informed customers of its decision, it said, adding it had received more than 2,000 complaints.
Intesa informed customers with a digital message sent to the inbox people have in their online and mobile accounts where they receive all other messages from their bank.
The regulator said the message was “ambiguous and sent in a way that is not consistent with the importance of the matter at stake.”
The absence of a notice in writing had already drawn criticism from the party of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.
Her Brothers of Italy party asked the Treasury last month to protect Intesa customers by giving them more time to opt out of what politicians argued would be a “forced migration”.
Complaints also prompted Italy’s central bank to step in to monitor the transition.
Isybank, a cloud-based, low-cost mobile bank, is a key plank of Intesa CEO Carlo Messina’s long-term strategy to withstand competition from fintech, by cutting costs and focusing the bank on value-added services such as wealth management and insurance.
After launching Isybank in June, Intesa at the beginning of October started moving about 300,000 customers from its traditional network.
The bank has said Isybank targets around 4 million younger customers who do not use its branch services.
However the move, which entailed a change of bank details, temporarily disrupted some people’s accounts.
The antitrust also said that the shift to Isybank carried with it “important changes” to the terms and conditions of the accounts.
Intesa told a presentation in June that it would over time increase the number of services Isybank users can access on their accounts.
High-street banks’ current IT infrastructure is dated and often made unwieldy by mergers that brought together different systems, making the shift to cloud extremely challenging.
(Reporting by Giulia Segreti; Editing by Valentina Za)
