OREANDA-NEWS. Franco Bassanini, Chairman, and Giovanni Gorno Tempini, Chief Executive Officer at Italy’s Cassa Depositi e Prestiti (CDP), and Dr Ulrich Schroder, Chief Executive Officer of the KfW Group, met in Berlin in the context of an enhanced dialogue. The working meeting aimed to intensify the dialogue and cooperation between the two institutions, which have been collaborating for many years as founding members of the Long-Term Investors’ Club.

The main topics addressed during this meeting were export finance, strategic controlling and municipal finance. In addition, the two institutions agreed on an exchange of staff and expertise. This is to be done in the framework of short-term and longer-term secondments and give experts from both institutions the opportunity to better familiarise themselves with the business activities and promotional instruments of the other party.

“Particularly with a view to overcoming the financial and economic crisis, it is very important that banks with broad experience in stimulating the economy and providing long-term financing cooperate closely”, explained Dr Schroder. As a promotional bank of the Federal Republic of Germany, over many years we have actively taken responsibility for strengthening international partnerships between promotional banks and actively shaping European networks. CDP is one of our most important partners in Europe”, said Dr Schroder.

“CDP is playing an increasingly important role both at the national and at the international level. Accordingly, a systematic comparison with our European partners including KfW, some of which have different business models but a similar mission and are fulfilling the same mission of providing long-term finance, is currently very useful”, said Bassanini.

“Our institutions have many common fields of interest. These include infrastructure finance, export finance and the financing of SMEs”, explained Gorno Tempini. He also pointed out that exchanging staff “enables our institutions to get to know each other better, to expand our employees’ expertise and broaden the possibilities of future collaboration.”