"Promote specific initiatives to enhance the circulation of newspapers and magazines by encouraging dialogue between publishers and banks, in the common interest of protecting the freedom of information and the dissemination of corporate, financial and savings education and wider and more general objectives for progress and development ".
This is the objective of the agreement signed by the president of the Italian Banking Association, Antonio Patuelli, and by the President of the Italian Federation of News Publishers, Andrea Riffeser Monti, aimed at achieving good and effective cooperation practices between banks and companies in the newspaper sector and periodicals.
"The function of newspapers in collective life remains fundamental - said the President of Fieg Andrea Riffeser Monti - because they compare opinions and provide verified information, allowing citizens to form an opinion and make informed choices. However, it is now a matter of intercepting an influenced reader, sometimes disoriented by the overabundance of web sources, making newspapers available in unusual spaces: the multiple channels of contact with banks can become a new flywheel for information that can make citizens become a reader well informed and a circumspect user ".
"Free press and its wider dissemination - underlined the President of ABI, Antonio Patuelli - represent an exercise in freedom and democracy that must be constantly nurtured and safeguarded. Just as the banking world performs daily also for the social function of boosting economic growth, in the same way it intends to collaborate in the protection and development of publishing activities as a tool to guarantee information, knowledge and deepening. In particular, subjects such as credit, savings and financial education need a dialectical, reciprocal and transparent confrontation, to allow families and businesses to choose increasingly aware and responsible ".
The memorandum of understanding provides for the promotion, through the multiple channels of contact that the bank uses to offer banking services and not to its customers, specific initiatives to enhance the circulation of newspapers and periodicals, encouraging dialogue between individual publishers and individual banks. ; the establishment of a permanent ABI-FIEG table for the identification of issues of common interest; the realization of studies, investigations, convegni, courses and analogous initiatives; the participation of its own speakers at events organized by each of the parties signing the agreement.