Fashion Hub and SACE BT: Innovation In The Insurance Market Landscape

SACE’s role in assisting the economy and Italian companies has significantly expanded in recent years, with the strengthening of its insurance and financial product offering through numerous support initiatives, thus providing the best possible service to companies, especially SMEs.

Fashion Hub, the platform developed more than one year ago to assist Italian companies operating in the fashion sector, protecting their customers and encouraging turnover growth in Italy and overseas, fits into this framework. The ambitious project is the result of the partnership between SACE BT, the SACE Group company specialising in risk assessment and protecting commercial transactions, together with Fashion Bank, a business information company specialising in the fashion distribution market, and European Brokers, an international insurance brokerage company. The three players have provided their experience and their complementary and strategic expertise: SACE BT for managing risks, Fashion Bank for providing detailed information within an ecosystem of financial and commercial data, and European Brokers as an insurance broker and consultant. This cooperation allowed creating an innovative insurance product, especially devised for and modelled on the needs of producers and distributors in the fashion market.

It is an easy-to-use and intuitive tool. Through the website fashion-hub.it, companies of any size in the fashion sector may request consultancy that, enriched with Fashion Bank’s commercial information, offers tailor-made conditions and ensures continuous support in identifying the solutions best adapted to company needs.

The mission of Fashion Hub is to be the first choice for companies in the fashion market, protecting their investments with credit guarantee tools that are always innovative and adapted to the needs of those wanting to do business in fashion.

The project has achieved excellent results and, at the start of 2022, Fashion Hub was presented at Micam Milano, the international event promoted by the Italian footwear producer trade association: Assocalzaturifici.

As mentioned, SACE Group took part in this innovative project through SACE BT, the company founded in 2004 and specialising in short-term credit insurance, surety bonds, and construction risk protection. Since 2005, SACE BT has extended its operations to surety bonds and construction risk protection via the acquisition of ASSEDILE. In addition, SACE BT owns 100% of SACE SRV, a company specialising in commercial information and debt collection services.

SACE BT has shown a growth trend in the main economic and financial indicators presented in its financial statements. Indeed, despite the difficulties posed by the complex pandemic context, in the first half of 2021, SACE BT was continuously committed to carrying forward its mission of offering insurance services to business customers, with a special focus on SMEs, mobilising € 2.1 billion in resources.

“SACE BT strongly believes in this project, which we followed right from the start”, said Giusy Gangi, SACE BT commercial director.“Fashion Hub is a fundamental tool favouring the growth of sector companies, designed to provide essential coverage based on customer needs, through a dedicated portal for fast and effective service. SACE BT started an important transformation in 2017, the year we launched our business plan, completed in 2021. In a market context made more complex by the pandemic, with an exacerbation of liquidity risks and tensions, and by the strong push towards new working methods, the central element of our plan has certainly been Change, in all its forms. This entailed a series of actions that have led our company to evolve and acquire a new identity, through significant focus on the customer and the creation of new products and tools with a strong digital orientation.The work undertaken in partnership for Fashion HUB is an example of the success of this new approach: a tool available to all Italian companies, in particular SMEs, which operate in the fashion sector that permits companies to approach products traditionally considered complex in a fast, simple, and totally digital manner”.