Minibonds as a tool for extraordinary finance: when traditional credit channels are not sufficient.

Abstract

Historically, the Italian economic system has specific characteristics that outline a financially fragile and unbalanced structure from a capital and financial perspective. One of the fundamental issues is that opening a company's capital to the risk capital circuit represents a 'life-changing' event for businesses, a radical discontinuity from the traditional ownership-control regime, which is based on family control. A credit squeeze has been caused by and made worse by financial crises, banking problems, changes and imbalances in the equity and financial structure of companies, and all other difficulties resulting from the strong relationship between Italian banks and SMEs. Due to the financial crunch, companies are now looking outside of the banking system for additional and alternative sources of funding for both ongoing operations and investments in global development and competitiveness restoration. The thesis will develop in the beginning describing the environment and the characteristics of the contemporary capital market while in the second part, a study will be conducted on the issuance of a minibond of 8 million euros by Consorzio Innova Soc.Coop., the process of placement and the agents involved will also be presented.