Milano Hub

Milano Hub is the innovation centre created by 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 Banca d'Italia - 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 innovative projects and research activities; it complements Banca d'Italia's Fintech Channel, a space for dialogue with operators, and the Regulatory Sandbox, dedicated to supervisory-assisted experimentation activities.

Banca d'Italia's Innovation Facilitators.

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 digitalization.

The Call for Proposals

In order to maintain a constant dialogue with market operators, Milano Hub works mainly via its 'Call for Proposals' relating to different areas of innovation. The projects selected receive developmental support through:

• technical expertise in banking, finance and insurance and in specific areas, for example IT and regulation (for the latter, exclusively with regard to secondary acts adopted by Banca d'Italia and the primary legislation of which these sources constitute implementation)
• organization of seminars, events, conferences with representatives from the projects, institutions and the academic world.

Banca d'Italia 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.

Other activities

Milano Hub engages in dialogue and cooperation with other Innovation Facilitators and Institutions to promote the exchange of experiences and the development of joint initiatives in the field of innovation.

Ongoing

Innovation data challenge

January 2026 - Banca d'Italia-Milano Hub and Central Bank of Ireland launch the Innovation Data Challenge, a joint initiative designed to foster research in the retail payments sector (see Press release).  

For further information on the work of the Hub, please email us to: info@milanohub.bancaditalia.it.