SACE and its support to business growth in Italy and abroad

In recent years, the role SACE Group has played in supporting businesses has greatly expanded, extending in the domestic market and beyond. Indeed, in addition to highly digitalized insurance-financial services, SACE has developed many guidance initiatives to help Italian companies build new contacts, relationships and knowledge. 

In this framework, the Sace Connects program offers Italian enterprises the opportunity to take part in free business matching events, organized to strengthen their positioning in major international buyers’ supply chains. The initiative has already engaged 6,500 Italian companies since its launch, directly facilitating over 2,700 bilateral meetings with potential foreign clients. In addition to business matching, we are at companies’ side with training courses held by the SACE Education hub, which are free for enterprises and designed to help them develop the knowledge and skills required to operate and grow in foreign markets as well as in Italy, focusing in particular on export, “green” and digital businesses. In the past year, we have supported over 20,000 companies, and our Academy collaborates with 11 Italian universities and business schools. Both SACE Education and SACE Connects are accessible via the reserved area in the mysace.it website, with premium digital content available to registered users exclusively. Finally, the publications of our Ufficio Studi (Research Office) are made available to companies to help them set up a well-structured international strategy with awareness. Among these resources, the Where to export map is a digital interactive map that highlights growth paths for enterprises exporting and investing in 200 foreign markets.  

In this time of constant change, professional training is key. That’s why at SACE, with our INSIEME 2025 plan, we aim to be a Skill-Driven Organization founded on lifelong learning, our employees’ skills and the principles of on-the-job training. 

With INSIEME 2025 we have put sustainability and the central role of companies and people at the heart of SACE’s strategy. This has spurred a process of deep re-evolution in our business and organizational model, which culminated in the announcement of our new ESG Strategy at Dubai’s COP28. We outlined a Road Map to 2030 aiming to maximize our impact on the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), based on two pillars. The first one is to accelerate companies’ transition with a specific focus on the industries of the future (renewable energies, circular economy, electric vehicles and shared mobility) and great attention for SMEs, through the development of a dedicated ecosystem for them. The second pillar is to make SACE an “ESG Excellence Company” by guaranteeing coherence between our daily internal activities and the initiatives we carry out to reduce the organization’s environmental impact and to adopt sustainable models and behaviors. All of this stems from the importance we place on our role as trailblazers, so we can take the road to sustainable transformation together with the enterprises we support. 

They will have to maintain their competitive edge and keep up with technologies, first of all: these are necessary and required tools to face the many challenges of the present and the future, starting with climate change and its effects as they become increasingly disruptive. Investing in innovation indeed makes companies stand out. The data is clear about this: exportations by brands who invest in technology are 3 times higher than the others. And having competitive enterprises in the country means making the system as a whole more competitive, productive and resilient. One of our most recent studies, tied to the Where to export map – which sums up export opportunities for Italian businesses – shows how a nation investing in new technologies and AI for one third of the industries actually increases productivity by 20%, generating a multiplier effect for the entire economy that is worth 1.3% a year for the following 5 years. 

The Salone del Mobile is an important event for us at SACE because it offers us the opportunity to meet a number of companies that uphold Italian excellence in our country and abroad. In line with the past few editions, this year we will return in person at the Fair; furthermore, on 16th April with Italian Minister for Business and Made in Italy, Adolfo Urso, we will inaugurate our Terrazza del Made in Italy, on the 10th floor of SACE’s “Casa delle Imprese” at Via Verziere 11, a stone’s throw from Milan’s Duomo. 

During Fuorisalone, our terrace will host a variety of free events for companies, who can attend in person or connect remotely to join the conversation about the digitalization, sustainability, and internationalization of their business models. To sign up, all they have to do is go to this link. 

This will be only the first in a series of initiatives that will see the Terrazza become a hub for meetings and dialogue, open to enterprises.