Intesa Sanpaolo

Intesa Sanpaolo is one of Italy’s biggest banking groups, the sort of place people use for current accounts, mortgages, cards, savings and a wider financial menu than smaller banks can offer. By our assessment, it is especially strong in scale and breadth: retail banking, wealth services and corporate lending all sit under one roof. The downside is the one that comes with large universal banks: the experience can feel formal and a bit heavy, especially when compared with leaner digital-only rivals. In practice it is a bank of branches, apps, approvals and paperwork, with enough size to make it useful and enough complexity to make it less intimate. Intesa Sanpaolo sits near the top of Italian banking by reach and reputation, not as a niche player but as a central one. It is the kind of bank many people and businesses can use, though it is not the simplest choice if all you want is a lightweight app. In Italy, by our assessment, it is hard to ignore.