Fibanc Mediolanum: personal advisor or 'financial sect'?

Fibanc Mediolanum: from elitist bank to the advisor who never closes

A bank that promises a personal advisor available at all times, zero maintenance fees and a tailor-made plan. On paper, it sounds like private banking for the wealthy. In practice, the experience accumulated over years by Fibanc Mediolanum customers paints a different picture: a sales model that mixes the rhetoric of advice with target-driven pressure, where fees end up weighing more than the brochure suggests.

The institution began as Fibanc, an investment bank with physical branches, cash services and even a trading floor where customers would go to place buy and sell orders. Its acquisition by Banco Mediolanum, the group belonging to former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, transformed the business. The cash service disappeared, and with it much of the close personal treatment that defined the institution. Those who tried to get their money back faced two options, neither of them comfortable.

The advisor who's always there, and the fine print too

The sales pitch is compelling: a manager with a direct phone line, available at any hour, who designs a personalised plan and accompanies the customer for life. Some customers defend it enthusiastically, highlighting that the online bank works well, even from abroad, and that it charges no service fees. It's hard to understand what maintenance there is on an account whose balance the institution uses for its own investments and which pays the customer nothing in return, one of them reasons.

The flip side is less pleasant. Savings and investment plans accumulate fees that several customers describe as prohibitive in the short term and high in the long term, to the point of eating up the promised returns. Contributions are split across different dates to make it harder to withdraw money, and when someone requests a redemption, the retention calls begin. The advice looks far too much like a customer acquisition campaign.

The experience that ended with 60,000 euros lost

The harshest case in the discussion is that of a customer whose manager encouraged him to buy preference shares of the Bank of Iceland. He lost 60,000 euros and, according to his testimony, the institution never accepted any responsibility despite his complaints. It's the least presentable side of the model: personal advice comes with no guarantee.

There are also those who report charges after closing their current account by phone and transferring the money to another institution, with fees nobody had told them about. The comparison with a pyramid scheme comes up more than once in the discussion, and not just in the language: in the structure of pressure, targets and forced loyalty.

Is a Banco Mediolanum account worth it?

It depends on what you're looking for. For online banking with no maintenance fees and access from any country, there are customers satisfied for years. For long-term investment, the calculation changes: fees on savings plans are where the most disagreement arises, and the advice received has not always matched the wealth at stake.

The discussion doesn't settle the matter. Nobody disputes that the bank works; what is disputed is at what price, and with what independence, that advice sold as personal is given. A vocation for service, they say. The numbers of some customers tell a different story.