"Best Paper Awards Italy 2013” per la sessione Banking, in occasione della “European Business Research Conference”, Sheraton Roma Hotel, Roma, 05-06 settembre 2013.

The recent financial crisis has generated an impressive debate between practitioners and scholars about the causes and consequences of the crisis, as well as about the effectiveness of supervision and the overall architecture of prudential supervision for providing the stability of international financial system (Borio, 2008; Blundell-Wignall, Atkinson, Lee, 2008; Kirkpatrick, 2009; Acharya, Richardson, 2009). From this perspective, particularly interesting has been considered the experience of those banking systems, where the high level of debt achieved by families, can play a determinant role on the availability of credit for the whole economy. More in particular, among other issues, an increasing attention has been dedicated throughout two main objectives for families’ loans demand, namely the request for house’s purchase and consuming sustain (Ferrari et al, 2010). Moving from this perspective, the present work aims to analyze the dynamics that have affected the market of consumer credit in the aftermath of the recent financial crisis, with particular reference to management policies and commercial solutions adopted by leading operators in Italy. In this regard, we proceeded in the creation of a survey, which we conducted between late 2012 and the first quarter of 2013, through a careful choice of sampling analysis, made as of the preparation and subsequent administration of a specific questionnaire we submitted to a selected sample of Italian credit intermediaries. As expected, among other results, we find that the financial crisis strongly reduced the capability of families to achieve any financing for their purposes, even if significant differences arise from specific characteristics of loans and customers creditworthiness.