- Agreement signed between SACE BT and Enel Energia so that business customers can easily request to pay their bills in instalments
Rome, November 28th, 2022 – Enel Energia and SACE have signed an agreement that will make it easier for business customers to request to pay their electricity and gas bills in instalments. The purpose of the agreement is to provide the most favorable conditions for customers of Enel Energia – an Enel Group company that sells electricity and gas on the free market in Italy – in order to negotiate deferred bill payment through Cauzione Energia PMI, a fully digital solution implemented by SACE BT – the SACE Group company specializing in short-term trade credit insurance, surety bonds, and protection against construction risks – for supporting Italian SMEs affected by rising energy costs.
“The agreement further complements the program of extraordinary measures that we have implemented in order to mitigate the effects of the energy crisis for all our customers, whether business or residential,” said Nicola Lanzetta, Director of Enel Italia. “We will also implement this plan in the coming months, taking into consideration the evolution of the scenario and the developments of the measures recently adopted by the Italian Government.”
“The agreement with Enel Energia proves that the SACE Group is committed to helping Italian businesses tackle rising energy costs, ensuring business continuity with tangible solutions that meet their actual needs in a rather complex scenario,” said Valerio Perinelli, General Manager at SACE BT. “Cauzione Energia PMI has made it possible for us, at SACE BT, to once again prove that we are able to support small and medium-sized enterprises with an offer of comprehensive, easily accessible, and digitalized solutions."
Designed to make it easier for instalment plans to be granted for amounts relating to electricity and gas consumption, the agreement allows companies to offer a payment guarantee, in the form of a surety bond, which is only issued once creditworthiness has been established, in the amount of the deferred bills.
Once the SMEs have negotiated the structure of the instalment plan for one or more energy bills with Enel Energia, they can request a surety bond online at sace.it. A simulator is available on the website, which provides an initial indication in real time of whether the request is acceptable and of how much the surety bond will cost based on 2021 budget data. SACE BT will analyze the request and, should the evaluation process be successful, will issue the guarantee to be submitted digitally to Enel Energia.
The agreement benefited from the exemption from the application of the regulations on transactions between related parties based on the provisions of the procedure adopted by Enel regarding transactions carried out through subsidiaries.
Enel, which celebrates its 60th anniversary this year, is a multinational power company and a leading integrated player in the global power and renewables markets.
At global level, it is the largest renewable private player, the foremost network operator by number of end users and the biggest retail operator by customer base. The Group is the worldwide demand response leader and the largest European utility by ordinary EBITDA [1] .
Enel is present in 30 countries worldwide, producing energy with around 93 GW of total capacity.
Enel Grids, the Group’s global business line dedicated to the management of the electricity distribution service worldwide, delivers electricity through a network of around 2.3 million kilometers to approximately 76 million end users. The Group brings energy to more than 70 million homes and businesses. Enel’s renewables arm Enel Green Power has a total capacity of more than 56 GW and a generation mix that includes wind, solar, geothermal, and hydroelectric power, as well as energy storage facilities, installed in Europe, the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Oceania. Enel X Global Retail, Enel's global advanced energy services business line, has a total capacity of around 8.2 GW of demand response managed globally and has installed 65 MW of behind-the-meter storage capacity. In addition, Enel X Way is the Group’s new company fully dedicated to electric mobility, managing nearly 430,000 public and private EV charging points worldwide, both directly and through interoperability agreements.
[1] Enel’s leadership in the different categories is defined by comparison with competitors’ FY 2021 data. Publicly owned operators are not included.
SACE is the Italian insurance-financial company, controlled by the Ministry of Economy and Finance, specializing in supporting businesses and the national economic fabric through a wide range of tools and solutions to support competitiveness in Italy and around the world. For over forty years, SACE has been the partner of choice for Italian companies that export and grow in foreign markets. It also supports the banking system, facilitating access to credit for companies with its financial guarantees, a role reinforced by recent extraordinary measures aimed at supporting liquidity, investments for competitiveness, and sustainability as part of the Italian Green New Deal, starting with the domestic market. SACE, with its portfolio of insured transactions and guaranteed investments totaling €165 billion, with the other companies in the Group – SACE FCT, operating in the field of factoring, SACE BT, active in the fields of Credit, Surety Bonds and Other asset damage, and SACE SRV, specializing in credit recovery and information asset management – serves more than 25,000 companies, especially SMEs, and helps them grow in Italy and in some 200 foreign markets.