Lombardy is where Italy actually builds things. The region's manufacturing base runs on equipment finance the way other cities run on venture capital, and Milan's banks have spent decades getting good at underwriting physical assets. That expertise is about to matter in a new way, because the next generation of physical assets is starting to run on AI.
Industrial robots and drones are increasingly leased rather than bought, the same way cars are, but the financial infrastructure hasn't caught up. Car leases get pooled and sold to funds because decades of mileage and resale data make the risk predictable. A robot fleet doesn't have that history, but it has something a car never had: it streams its own performance data in real time, hours run, output, wear, revenue per unit. That's a fundamentally different underwriting problem, and one that looks a lot more like how Stripe already evaluates businesses off processing data than how a bank evaluates a car loan.
This session is for the people who'll actually build this: asset-finance teams who understand leasing, and robotics or drone-logistics operators who understand what these machines actually do in the field.
We'll get into where embedded financing for machine fleets is heading, and the open question nobody's solved yet, what a robot is worth in two years when the technology cycle moves faster than any depreciation schedule was built for.
