BNP Paribas Securities Service has won a €11bn custody mandate from Gruppo Banco Desio, marking the latest example of an Italian bank looking to consolidate its custody services with a single supplier.

Banco Desio previously had its local assets with a local CSD and its foreign assets with a global custodian.

“By choosing BNP, Banco Desio took a more strategic decision to leave the local custody and consolidate all the custody into one custodian," Silvia Pellegrini, global sales and relationship manager at BNP Securities Services, told Global Investor/ISF.

Onboarding the client was completed in December 2016.

“We thought that many banks would not like to address all the IT developments that need to be in line with Target2Securities requirements," said Pellegrini. "We therefore contacted Italian players to understand if they wanted to become direct members or if they were looking into the opportunity of externalising those services that were not core to their businesses,” said Pellegrini.

"We looked into consolidating their services into one single provider. We have now ended up with 30 to 40 Italian banks with these types of services."

Banco Desio was one of the very first Italian banks that BNP contacted 10 years ago, although it only reached the decision one year ago to have an internal reorganisation.

Onboarding for the deal was completed in December 2016, following Banco Desio's decision one year ago to reorganise its internal divisions, Pellegrini said.

Pellegrini cited BNP's particular open model, with some of its services centralised in Paris, in addition to its strong local presence in Italy as reasons for winning the Italian mandate. With more than 500 people in Milan, local experts can follow every type of problem that Italian banks may face from fiscal to regulation.

Banco Desio is a mid-sized regional commercial bank, which is very focussed on retail clients and mid-sized institutional clients," said Pellegrini. "It wanted to focus more on services core to its clients."

Having already acquired another smaller Italian bank, Banco Desio can have “free internal resources to dedicate to either follow upcoming regulation in the market (such as Mifid II or European Market Infrastructure Regulation) or for just more strategic projects. This was the key driver for them.”

This deal marks the second major European securities services mandated announced by BNP Paribas since the French bank appointed Emma Crabtree as head of sales, continental Europe, at the end of 2016.

BNP Securities Services said on February 21 it had been selected by Mapfre Inversion, the Spain-based investment management firm, to provide custody services for its €60 billion portfolio of assets. 

Claudine Gallagher was chosen to lead BNP Paribas Securities Services across the entire Americas region, as reported on February 14. The former JP Morgan executive joined the bank in 2012.