Improving the Ecobonus process for financial institutions

To help kickstart the recovery of the economy as a result of the pandemic, the Government of Italy enforced its own pre-existing Ecobonus program to support and incentivize homeowners, residential housing developers and social housing institutions to make housing more energy efficient and reduce seismic risk.

The program provides a tax deduction for 110 percent of the cost of the work, which can be either deducted against taxes directly, transferred to a bank and exchanged for the required finance, or transferred to a supplier company that carries out the renovation and claims the tax benefit or transfers the credit to a bank.

In the past two years, the Ecobonus program created a new market for financial institutions to properly assess grant applications in real time, which required strong fiscal and technical competencies. The addition of regulatory complexities also created a need from customers to prepare and submit documentation for their applications and obtain mandatory attestations.

KPMG in Italy worked with Microsoft to create a customizable platform to help financial institutions manage the process and transactions. The platform also assists customers in producing the necessary documentation to ensure eligibility, including attestations, with technical appraisals being provided by business partners.

The KPMG platform, enabled by Microsoft Azure and integrated with Microsoft Teams, helps:

• Support financial institutions with scale, cost-effectiveness and efficiencies.
• Simplify the customer process and act as a “help desk” for submitting applications.
• Streamline processes and confirm that the information submitted is accurate and eligible.
• Verify site information accuracy and act as a control to maintain integrity.
• Assist external professionals (including KPMG professionals) along the “journey” to carry out mandatory attestations.

The platform, which combines KPMG professionals’ deep tax and legal industry expertise, along with trusted Microsoft technology that integrates with core banking solutions, supports single sign-on and can be set up within weeks. To date, 15 financial institutions (including Banca Popolare di Sondrio) — and nearly 60,000 customers — have used KPMG’s platform to help ensure housing in Italy is more environmentally friendly.

This project is just one example of how KPMG and Microsoft are helping organizations and their customers find digital solutions that can streamline processes while helping to mitigate regulatory risk. Moving forward, KPMG in Italy is evaluating how the platform can expand and be applied to other areas, as well as similar credit and grant opportunities.