Talking about finance in an increasingly contracted and complex market these days is a delicate and often very difficult matter. Especially when the interlocutor is the young, the new generations, who are already making plans in the short term and are straddling increasingly different and changing eras.
Starting Finance was born with this challenge in mind. Made by young people, it continues its dialogue with young people and succeeds in making itself understood and capturing their attention, even to those who are a little slow or unfamiliar with finance.
The annual Starting Finance Investment Meeting 2025 (SFIM) is a stage, an occasion and format made and built just for them, the young people. And this year it surpassed itself, demonstrating with the new edition held in Rome at the Palazzo dei Congressi a record attendance: more than three thousand participants, more than double last year’s number, who were able to listen to the protagonists of the Italian economy and discuss with them.
More than 40 speakers took turns on stage, including big names from Italian industry and finance. These included Benedetto Vigna (CEO of Ferrari), Matteo Del Fante (CEO of Poste Italiane), Francesco Gattei (chief transition & financial officer and general manager of Eni), Daniele Caprini (head of group planning and control of Enel), Gianluca Corti (co-CEO of Wind Tre), Stefano Achermann (CEO of Be Shaping the Future), Andrea Busi (CEO of Directa SIM), Gianluigi Guida (CEO of Binance Italy), Carlo Cottarelli (director of the Education Programme for Economic and Social Sciences at the Università Cattolica), Pasqualino Monti (CEO of Enav) and others.
We managed to talk about everything, even topics that, at first glance, may seem far removed from the audience’s age, but which, thanks to the format and the type of language used, Starting Finance managed to communicate at its best: from ethics in finance, start-ups, innovation to Italian competitiveness and made in Italy, from tariffs to the evolution of markets and the potential of the crypto-asset sector, to the relationship between business and society.
Being able to enter and wander around the Palazzo dei Congressi, stumbling upon live trading sessions on the one hand, simulations, academies and then workshops on the other, all the way to speeches, speeches and interviews on the main stage located in the centre of the building with exceptional guests, is what a young 30-year-old was able to experience, observe, immerse himself in, as if he were visiting a citadel of economics and finance, a unique experience that a millennial full of dreams and projects, perhaps even in their early stages, was able to experience and find concreteness throughout the day of the event.
The SFIM proved once again that young people not only want to understand finance, they want to be part of it, and that companies, institutions and industry leaders have everything to gain from listening and talking to them. As Stefano Achermann, CEO of Be Shaping the Future, an IT consulting company, advised: ‘what makes the difference in this world is study, the desire to put your heart into it, wanting to do different things. You also have to be generous, because generosity always comes back’. And specifically, talking about the Be Shaping programme for young people, he clarified his strategic vision: ‘If we have 100 talents a year, we are able to accelerate careers within a year. If we do an accelerated training programme and these 100 young people we ‘slaughter’ them, in a good way, by making them do things outside the norm, these 100 people will be able to accelerate their career by one year. The characteristics of these young people must be head, English, good studies and grades, basic banking knowledge, excel, and for the rest we do it ourselves’.
Not only finance in the narrow sense. The SFIM 2025 also addressed its implications with geopolitics. This was discussed by Francesco Gattei, who pointed out that the energy sector is ‘a strategic key for Italy because, with its industrial and logistical chains, it is strongly intertwined with the issue of national and international security’. Gattei added, however, that more awareness is needed on this issue, because “in recent years the debate on energy transition has been not very serious and not very technical, reduced almost to a derby between opposing supporters”. If the transition process turned out to be slower than expected, according to Gattei, it was because “for a long time it did not have an economic and industrial basis, but an ideological one”.
Startupbusiness interviewed Marco Scioli, founder of Starting Finance.
What is the long-term vision of Starting Finance and how do events like SFIM contribute to realising it?
“The vision is very much connected to the event: for us it is the moment of meeting with the community, with the speakers and all the stakeholders of the Starting Finance universe. The event was born from the Starting Finance university clubs that were organising activities in the area and at a certain point we thought ‘but if there are now 50 people in Milan, 70 people in Bari, 100 people in Rome doing Starting Finance events, why don’t we do one that brings the whole community together’? This is how the idea of the investment meeting was developed. This is very much related to the medium and long term vision: to always be able to maintain the concept of financial education, financial awareness and financial information, but doing so, on the one hand with the institutions that we are trying to bring to our language, and on the other hand with the companies, which are beginning to understand the importance of the topic. The community that is increasingly coming together at this event is the perfect fit for all of this”.
How do you see yourselves three years from now?
“We want to become the reference point for economic-financial education and information in Italy and for a young audience. We are already well advanced and the idea from next year is to start an internationalisation test. In three years’ time we want to expand the model also on a European basis’.
In which areas and countries?
“In countries that are very similar to us at the level of financial literacy but also cultural literacy, such as Spain and Portugal. Then there is the issue of English: more than countries we want to try to bring what we do to the level of English, because we are convinced that the numbers could be completely different. We have a lot of experiences of this kind: for example, with our business school we went to San Francisco a fortnight ago; last week we had an experience at Buffett’s conference in Nebraska; so we went outside and even outside they tell us ‘Look something like this doesn’t exist’. It’s not just an Italian thing and it’s not just a cultural thing, although in Italy there is a problem with financial education and so it’s easier to take root’.
What are the tools you consider most effective to attract these young people?
“We have always done activities in the university in clubs and events like today, but the volumes that can be done on social are not comparable with anything else. Over the past 12 months we grow by an average of two thousand users a day on the various platforms between Starting finance, Economica and Nabila. So the three realities of the group and the media ecosystem and it is clear that two thousand new people a day is nowhere else to be found’.
In a rapidly changing environment of fintech, artificial intelligence and sustainability, what are the next challenges and opportunities that Starting Finance intends to seize?
“Keeping up with technology is the most important key for us because, it is true that we are a digital, social and somewhat technological reality, but clearly we were born as a media and education reality, and therefore being able to keep up with technology is fundamental because to date we have innovated, we believe we have innovated a language model and therefore do communication, information and education in a certain way. The risk is that if we don’t innovate ourselves, in 3-4 years someone else will come along’.
Here, in these days when there is so much talk about ‘bridges’, Starting Finance has proved to be an effective bridge between institutions, businesses and the new generations, focusing on education, community and technology, with the aim of stretching the bridge in Europe and staying at the forefront of innovation.
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