A digital repertoire of Italian banks (1861-present)? Why and what for: the case of cooperative banks

Italian banking historiography has a solid tradition and is one of the most internationally accredited. However, the lack of unambiguous knowledge of one of the most widely used structural data to evaluate a banking system emerges, namely the number of institutions that exercise credit. For the first seventy-five years since Unity in 1861 (almost half its existence), it has never been reconstructed. The criticalities for the identification of the banking subjects are in fact of two orders: on the one hand, the non-systematic nature of the surveys, which are absent for certain institutional categories and even for entire periods; on the other hand, the non-exhaustive nature of the surveys present (which many institutions avoided) for the phase before the introduction of the Register of Banks in 1926. This seems particularly true for certain categories of operators, including private bankers – whose difficult identification often stems from their hybrid mercantile-credit nature – but also rural banks, whose actual numerical consistency and spatial distribution partly escapes from the statistical surveys in the first decades of life of the cooperative movement. Think, for example, about the establishment of two or more rural banks in the same territory, with or without confessional inspiration, with the consequence of sometimes creating confusion in the numerical identification of the operators. Therefore, between the 19th and 20th centuries it is not always easy to reconstruct the population of credit unions, whose existence was sometimes limited to a few years with the tendency to reconstitute after a short time, sometimes with a membership that was in part equal. The creation of a digital repertoire, which collects the main biographical information of the universe of Italian credit institutions from unification to the present, represents, therefore, a decisive advance for the knowledge of the banking sector in the long run. The potential of such a database is multiple. From a heuristic standpoint, in fact, it offers extraordinary possibilities for analysis in two respects:  macroeconomic: by providing information on the type of banking (including also the less structured morphologies such as private bankers, credit unions, pawnshops, etc.), legal forms, geographical areas, size classes, etc.;  microeconomic: by following the evolution of individual institutions (also little known to the literature), their expansionary processes and the possible existence of relational networks with other subjects, or by tracing the genealogy of banking groups/institutions. The repertoire is also a fascinating entry point to get to know the Italian banking world. For example, the prosopographical reading, allowed by the company profiles, would help to sensitize the local communities on the positive function that the credit activity has had for the development, not only economic, of the territory. In addition, the availability, within the same database, of many profiles offers the possibility to easily grasp similarities and differences between individual operators in the credit world.