Milano Hub is the innovation centre created by the Banca d'Italia to support the digital evolution of the financial market and encourage the attraction of talent and investments.
Milano Hub engages innovators in a place, physical and virtual, in which the Bank of Italy - while respecting its institutional role - through a series of consulting services, mentorship, and educational components to financial intermediaries, startups, and research centres aims at accelerating the development of projects and at promoting the quality and safety of specific innovations.
Milano Hub supports the development of aligning innovative projects for the benefit of the system.
Objectives
Milano Hub aims to achieve the following objectives:
- to support the early adoption of digital technologies by the financial market;
- to facilitate the adoption of solutions able to control the different types of risk effectively;
- to strengthen the capacity of intermediaries to respond to the challenges of the digitization.
Activities
In order to maintain a constant dialague with market operators, Milano Hub works via its 'Call for proposals' relating to different areas of innovation. The projects selected will receive developmental support through:
- the provision of sector expertise in banking, financial and insurance matters and in specific areas (e.g. IT, legal);
- regulatory in-depth studies;
- organization of seminars, events, conferences with representatives from the projects, institutions and the academic world.
The Bank of Italy will not provide any form of financial assistance or any contribution to the acquisition of goods or services or support the projects in terms of promotional initiatives or marketing activities.
Ongoing
Call for Proposals 2022:
- On 25 November 2022, during the final plenary session of Il Salone dei Pagamenti at the MiCo Congress Centre in Milan, the Call for Proposals 2022 theme has been announced: "Application of technology based on distributed ledgers (Distributed Ledger Technology - DLT) to banking, financial, insurance and payment services, with special regard to ensuring: governance reliability and compliance with the applicable provisions and guidelines expressed by the Authorities; robust settlement mechanisms with particular regard to solutions capable of ensuring the final settlement of payments in central bank money; interoperability with other DLT platforms or platforms based on alternative models (e.g. API); certainty and security of operations from a technical and legal standpoint (for example, in terms of the finality of transactions); consumer protection".
- Applications may be submitted from 15 December 2022 and no later than 31 January 2023. The Rules of the Call for Proposals 2022 will be published shortly.
Call for proposals 2021 - chronology:
- On 25 November 2022, at the final plenary session of Il Salone dei Pagamenti at the MiCo Congress Centre in Milan, the Call for Proposals 2021 has been closed; the 10 eligible projects supported by the Hub have been presented during the event and dedicated stands within the Banca d'Italia area have been reserved for the participants.
In the Call for proposals 2021 webpage you can find more details about the rules and related application forms.
For further information on the work of the Hub, please email: milanohub@bancaditalia.it.
