"Young Factor": the responsibilities of finance, in dialogue with young people

On the occasion of "Young Factor, a dialogue among young people, economics and finance," the conference sponsored by the Osservatorio Permanente Giovani-Editori and Intesa Sanpaolo, Chairman Gian Maria Gros-Pietro shared some reflections with the young people attending the event, about the role and responsibility of banks and finance in shaping the future.

"Young Factor" is an international event that provides a unique opportunity to discuss how to promote young people’s economic and financial literacy as well as their sense of belonging to the European Union.

Below are some of the topics that Chairman Gian Maria Gros-Pietro addressed in his speech during the closing day of the event hosted at the headquarters of Borsa Italiana:

• The transition towards the evolutions made possible by science and technology will require enormous investments: we will need to build new production facilities, operating on the basis of new technologies, and recycle materials from decommissioned ones; the spatial distribution of supply chains will need to be updated in light of the vulnerabilities that emerged during the pandemic; the entire logistics network will have to be redesigned to shift from a linear economic model, which turns resources into products and products into waste, into a circular model, which recovers the resources contained in products
• The immense volume of investments required will be a good thing: it means the activation of dormant capital, the activation of the labour factor, the circulation of wealth; the increased circulation of capital earmarked for investments to protect the planet could also promote income redistribution and the mitigation of inequality, both between and within countries
• The role of finance is and will be central in directing and nurturing the desired change, in determining whether the goals are actually achievable and in designing the road map while ensuring that it is socially sustainable every step of the way: finance is well prepared for this process, as finance operators are accustomed not only to assessing the merit of the goal to be achieved but more importantly to verifying that the resources needed for each step are available, and from which sources they will come or may be offset
• This necessary transformation will require the development of new skills and behaviours, also incentivised at salary level, so that the stimulus can truly generate results: an opportunity for young people who would like to devote themselves to finance, which needs new people with significant skills and high expectations, oriented toward results that are also socially and environmentally appreciable.