Relationship o transactional: quale modello di riferimento per le attività di corporate banking?

In recent years, a sweeping change has affected the competitive context that gives rise and develops the complex and wide-ranging relationships among firms, which must cope with the need for continuous investments in order to work in a global and highly competitive market, and financial intermediaries, which have always been their first interlocutors in order to cover the resulting financial requirements. This paper purposes to offer a few thought-provoking considerations to analyze and get to understand what is for banks the most adequate model for interacting with firms committed to ambitious growth and development projects and, just on this account, in the condition to have recourse quite frequently to extraordinary financial transactions. Therefore, having defined the different roles than the intermediary is required to play and having laid emphasis on the need to offer the broad range of products and services that is typical of corporate banking, a comparison is made between the relationship banking and the transactional banking approaches with a view to explaining how the latter come into play in the organizational structure of a bank and how they are characterized in the relationship between the two parties. In the light of these considerations, this paper points to the need and expediency for firms to establish and maintain a privileged relationship with a reference bank having an adequate standing, as well as to the validity - for those banks willing to play a leading role in that sector - of a relationship banking model with a well definite target of dynamic firms run by competent and experienced managers.