UniCredit tops profit forecast, buys cloud-based bank

Italian bank UniCredit on Wednesday posted better-than-expected second quarter profit and said it was buying a Belgian digital bank with its own cloud-based IT platform for 370 million euros ($401 million).

Led since 2021 by former UBS investment banking chief Andrea Orcel, UniCredit is at the center of speculation over potential mergers and acquisitions after aborted attempts to move on Germany’s Commerzbank and Italy’s Banco BPM.

UniCredit said the purchase of Belgian bank Aion and its cloud-based core banking system Vodeno would add a team of 200 engineers, developers and data scientists.

Banks globally face the challenge of migrating their legacy IT systems onto the cloud. To address this, UniCredit’s rival Intesa Sanpaolo for example is partnering with British cloud banking technology provider ThoughtMachine.

“The transaction represents one of the first moves by a bank to acquire full ownership of a new technology (without any dependencies from third party core banking providers),” UniCredit said.

Net profit in the second quarter rose 5% from the previous three months to 2.7 billion euros, surpassing a 2.4 billion euro average forecast from analysts polled by the bank as revenues held up better than anticipated.

With euro zone interest rates peaking, Italian banks have vowed to grow net fees to make up for the shrinking gap between lending and deposits rates, which have in recent quarters driven profits to record levels.

UniCredit said net lending income eased 0.4% between April and June versus the first quarter, but fees rose 0.9% on a quarterly basis and 10% annually.

Overall revenues posted a smaller-than-anticipated 0.7% quarterly drop to 6.3 billion euros in the period.

UniCredit slightly raised its revenue forecast for the year to above 23 billion euros, but stood by a 2024 net profit goal of more than 8.5 billion euros. It plans to distribute at least 90% of that to shareholders, mostly through share buybacks.